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Researchers at the exo.blog have posted a column comparing performance between Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) and with Service Pack 3 (SP3), which was released a few days ago to mixed reviews. Using standard benchmarking tests, the investigators found that SP3 performance was 10% better than with SP2. That’s very good for a service pack that did not advertise any performance enhancements.

Of course, you had to get past the upgrade successfully before you would see any improvements. There were a large number of reports of problems with the upgrade process. These problems were widely reported on the Web, including a column in this blog. We have not seen any authoritative source even take a guess at what percentage of all upgraded systems exhibited serious problems.

Here’s a key quote from the exo.blog page: “Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release - unlike w/Vista SP1, Microsoft made no promises of improved performance for XP - the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus. In fact, XP SP3 is shaping-up to be a 'must have' update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond's not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS.” Good stuff, actually.

The column goes on, of course, to point out what is made very obvious by the graph accompanying the post: when compared to SP performance, Vista performance absolutely sucks. Looks to me like XP may be close to 3 times as fast. That’s a big difference, and a big part of why users with a choice don’t want to move to Vista.