Principled Technologies has released two Microsoft commissioned reports on Windows Vista SP1 performance. In these tests, Principled Technologies measured responsiveness of Windows Vista SP1 vs. Windows Vista RTM vs. Windows XP SP2 when performing a set of common business and home tasks.

The results show that SP1 performs on par with Vista RTM and Windows XP.

Though commissioned by Microsoft these are independent third party tests. These tests illustrate SP1 performing comparably to XP while follow the same strict methodology used by Principled Technology at Windows Vista RTM.

The test show that as with Windows Vista RTM, overall performance is on par with Windows XP. It’s important to remember that Windows Vista is a more advanced operating system, which includes many more capabilities than Windows XP. By default, Windows Vista includes antispyware, a search indexer, and the shadow copy service. All these work in the background, providing important services to customers, but they of course take up a portion of the PCs memory and processor resource.

Vista SP1 includes changes focusing on improving the performance of Windows Vi sta in several areas like, copying or moving files around your PC, your home network, or your corporate network, resuming faster from sleep, etc.

It may be recalled that Microsoft had during the release of Windows Vista RTM, in November 2006, commissioned Principled Technologies to develop and run a set of test that compared the responsiveness of Windows Vista and Windows XP SP 2 on common business and home tasks. The results revealed that Window Vista performance was on par with Windows XP. With the recent RTM of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 we commissioned Principled Technologies to do an update that compares those earlier test results to SP1. In their tests Principled Technologies found that Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP2 performed comparably on most test operations.

Performance differences between the two operating systems on most tasks were insignificant, typically less than a half second.

On several common business and home operations Windows Vista SP1 was noticeably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP.

source: winvistaclub.com