An article from Computer World says the Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) beta, recently released to about 15,000 testers, runs Microsoft's Office Suite 10% faster than Windows XP SP2. Performance testing was done by Devil Mountain Software, with the results leading to further speculation that Windows XP is going absolutely nowhere.

The tests were also performed with Windows Vista and Windows Vista SP1. Benchmarks from the tests show Windows XP SP3 to be more than two times faster than Vista SP1, which doesn't bode well for Windows Vista.

Craig Barth, Devil Mountain's chief technology officer, said in a recent blog, "we are pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP SP3 delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS." He also noted that SP3 is shaping up to be a 'must-have' update for the majority of users still running XP.

The OfficeBench suite of performance benchmarks run by Devil Mountain Software were run on a laptop equipped with Office 2007. The laptop, the same unit used in the Vista/Vista SP1 tests earlier, featured a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory.

Microsoft wasn't available over this past weekend to comment about XP's performance, but a spokeswoman said in an email that Vista SP1 is still in the development phase and will undergo several changes before being released.

Recently, Forrester Research said that Windows XP remained Windows Vista's biggest rival, citing survey data showing that American and European businesses would delay Vista deployment.  Why? Well, in the past it has largely concerned application incompatibility issues, causing a wait-and-see approach to Vista...but now corporate IT teams can add one more reason to the pile.

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