Well, it’s been talked about anecdotaly in web forums for a while now that the new service pack for XP brought with it an unexpected performance boost.
The researchers found that a PC loaded with Microsoft’s XP SP3 completed the OfficeBench test suite in less than 50 seconds. A similarly configured system running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 took more than 50 seconds to complete the test suite — which measures how quickly a computer can perform common tasks in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
“Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release … the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus,” the researchers wrote.
They added that XP SP3’s slick performance may lead some computer users to forgo Windows Vista. Exo.performance.network found that with the new service pack, XP is now two times faster than the newer Microsoft OS.
The tests were conducted late last year on a prerelease build of XP SP3. So it’s possible the final version is even faster.
It’s not all four-star reviews for the service pack, however…
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