This according to Neowin. It seems that Microsoft’s latest service pack for WinXP provides some performance gains for some PCs. However, the article also states that the latest service pack for Win Vista, that is SP1, doesn’t provide any provide gain at all. And Microsoft has said that WinXP SP3 is just a collection of patches and nothing more, yet it does make your WinXP faster. My company has several systems on Win Vista and I must say, these systems are seriously under-powered to be using Vista. I think that Microsoft should make it a priority to ensure that Vista is streamlined and improved so that it won’t be a drag on productivity. Loading times for Vista can be tedious to say the least, and with anti-virus, anti-spyware and whatever security software, most Vista systems can be unbearable to use.

Several of my company’s oldest PCs is still based on WinXP, and these run fine. At least they are bearable. A clean installation of Vista doesn’t help much however, with a clean installation of WinXP, most Pentium 4 systems run great. Just with 256MB of RAM and you are okay. With Vista, even with 1 GB of memory (and higher end systems as well), it is dead slow. Loading basic software like Excel and Word is also slow, not to mention other higher requirement software. I won’t want to state the obvious, but Vista systems are terrible for offices and work. A lot of the staff are frustrated with their systems, and this results in slower productive and my boss breathing down my neck. A lot of PC manufacturers nowadays only offer systems with just Windows Vista. I am ditching all of them, except Dell, who offers their customers WinXP as an alternative. More manufacturers should consider offering WinXP alternatives than just Vista ones. Vista is not only slow, a lot of older software cannot run on Vista systems and this can result in a lot of problems, especially for the IT departments. And just think of the upgrade cost for all those software! It’s going to be a financial nightmare for the company.

Anyway, anyone here tried WinXP SP3 yet? If it is as good as the article claims, I think it’s a good time to upgrade your WinXP system to SP3. With the performance gain and all the security patches, I think everyone should consider patching their system to SP3. Well, this service pack is supposed to come out in 2005. But I guess Microsoft was too busy trying to counting their billions to concentrate, so it was delayed. Yes, that’s what rich people and their employees do, count money. What? You expect them to care about their customers???!!! What I am even more afraid of is that once Microsoft realize that their SP3 will result in better performance for WinXP, they will be tempted to delay the release even further. Or even forgo releasing it! You will never know what Microsoft will do to ensure that people buy their latest Operating System (aka Windows Vista).

I am going to patch all my office systems when it is offically launched. Hope it is as good as the article says it is.