Windows XP SP3 to offer speed boost?

Will Windows XP get a considerable speed boost with Service Pack 3 while Vista sees no speed improvements in SP1? That's what's being reported, based on the observations of Florida-based software development firm Devil Mountain Software. They claim that in tests, XP SP3 was 10 percent faster than XP SP2. Meanwhile, they found Vista SP1 to be a "performance dud," in that it does not improve upon the relatively sluggish performance of the unpatched OS. "Of course, none of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than 2x slower than the most current builds of its older sibling," Devil Mountain writes on its blog. "Suffice to say that performance-minded users will likely choose to stick with the now even speedier Windows XP"

While the blogosphere is frothing at the mouth with "XP r00lz, Visa dr00lz" hysteria at the sight of this news, a little perspective is probably in order. First off, who is Devil Mountain Software and why should we trust their tests, the details of which are somewhat scant? Secondly, why is anyone surprised that a six year old operating system with three service packs is outperforming an OS that's not even a year old? Yeah, it will probably be a while before Vista has the same sort of caché in the enterprise that Windows XP and 2000 do. But it's unrealistic to expect Microsoft to fix everything, from security to performance issues, in just one service pack. Remember--most enterprises didn't deploy Windows XP until after SP2's release.

For more on the tests:
- see this Yahoo article
- and check out Devil Mountain's blog