Vista SP1 versus XP SP2: Benchmark tests

[David Baxter PhD]

Vista SP1 versus XP SP2: Benchmark tests
ZDNet
February 15, 2008

These are from a direct comparison on the same equipment - details in the full article.

Conclusions and Caveats
Looking at the data there?s only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw.

The best result for Vista SP1 was in the single file drive-to-drive copy, while the best result for XP SP2 was extracting multiple files from a compressed folder. Given these results and taking into account the improvments that SP1 bought to Vista, if I was to go back and compare XP SP2 with Vista RTM, XP would have hammered Vista even harder.

Reminder: These results apply to a single system and no optimizations were carried out to any of the systems. Your mileage can, and probably will, vary.