Now that I have been using both SP3 for XP and SP1 for Vista for over a week now and I have to disagree with the reports of the up to a “10% increase in performance for XP”, but also disagree with Vista SP1 providing no performance boosts – it is running faster than XP!

After reading the release notes for SP1 for Vista some of the performance increases are related to the file system providing significant boosts when copying files across hard drives. Below I have quoted (source) the reported percentages of copying files in different situations and I can definatley vouch for faster times.

  25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system

Many other improvments are also listed in these categories below:

• Hardware Ecosystem Support and Enhancements

• Application Compatibility Improvements

• Reliability Improvements

• Performance and Power Consumption Improvements

• Security Improvements

• Support for New Technologies and Standards

• Desktop Administration and Management

• Setup and Deployment Improvements

• Interoperability Improvements

• Feature or API Changes

• General Improvements and Enhancements

• Windows Vista Alignment with Windows Server 2008

These improvments are avaliable for viewing using this link.

As for XP SP3 RC, if anything, performance is either equal or less than before.