Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 What is the fastest?

[Simpson]

A series of bench was carried out by ZDnet to know which OS 2 was the fastest in operations.

Vista, the OS, costs the same as XP OEM. Businesses aren't upgrading the OS's, they're getting Vista on new machines, so there's no added cost in hardware except the normal cycle of replacement. 2gb of RAM doesn't cost anything these days, and any dual-core CPU is plenty of power. DRM doesn't affect businesses much, either. There's also little training, because Vista mirrors XP in most areas of the OS that users access.

If you're a single user, I'd agree, there isn't all that much reason to upgrade yet, unless you use your business machine for home use.

I appreciate the speed because I'm much more concerned with how fast a program launches, how long it takes to print/save/transfer/etc. Now, with Vista SP1 on my older AMD/1gb RAM machine, I'm happy with the speed.

We see that most of the time XP SP2 is the fastest despite the boost it expected to deliver its Vista SP1.

[Tomaz]

So if we exclude 64-bit then Vista SP1 is faster than XP SP2, but it's slower than XP SP3?
It means XP SP3 is the winner in 32-bit!

[TX-Snakebyte]

it was a huge failure - two OEMs could not provide the same level of service that our users expect.