http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-xp-sp3-yields-performance-gains.html

Nothing unexpected there, but its even faster than SP2 as well.

Think this is going to be a must have.

Quote

Haha... tested with 1gb of ram.

Tests with more, I said this and linked in another thread with some poor comments made in return  

SP1 for vista changes a few things and adds new features and the new DX update and ends up using even more resources, this may change since it is beta of the service pack but the fact that another beta sp3 for XP is actually running xp faster shows a bit of a funny turn there.

IF this holds water when both are officially released loads more will go back to xp I think
I still think MS Should bite the bullet and release dx10 for xp, would sell loads more games.

I dont quite understand all the foaming at the mouth.

A third service pack for an OS that has been incirculation for years and by now (should) require no major internal changes - and results in performance boosts - manages to surprise people.

Yet a beta service pack for an OS that is brand spanking new, full of new features and has not long been out gets slated because of a potential performance hit that may yet be ironed out before going RC?

As sdp pointed out, new OSes are pretty much always going to be slower than their predecessors (and I dont believe for one second this only applies to MS OSes) because of all the new features, kernal improvements, GUI improvements put into them.

Its perfectly analogous to the latest games. Better sound, better physics, improved graphics, more features, more intelligent AI, more going on in the background. You wouldnt be content for games to not improve and require a more powerful computer to run; I actually think we are spoilt now with the level of powerful hardware we have. multi-core for the masses, cheap memory, really powerful graphics cards, mammoth capacity hard drives.

Think back to how sluggish and slow performing computers were 5 years ago. Think back to closing down all your programs to increase memory and free CPU cycles. Then think back another 5 years. Then look at what the OSes, games and apps were capable of back then... precisely: jack sh*t.

I do so much more at any one time with my computer now, and leave things running all week I can come back to and the performance still remains reasonable, but Win XP starts to struggle to cope with its poor memory management. I cant wait to upgrade my hardware and slap Vista on with all the Aero polish, have all the bells and whistles running, leave Photoshop open with a few memory hungry design templates open, leave Firefox open with the myriad tabs I often have open, have CD burning in the background, leave Foobar playing some music or watch a DVD, leave EAC ripping a disc in FLAC, and so on and so forth, without slowdown and with the multiple CPU cores juggling the load.

This should be in software btw, moving...

Seems Microshaft isnt too happy about the rave reviews its getting...

http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2007/12/when_microsoft.html?source=rss