Citing tests from performance testing developer Devil Mountain Software, the report says the upcoming Service Pack 3 for Windows XP will bring meaty performance increases that will make XP significantly speedier than Windows Vista. To be more specific, Devil Mountain Software claims it discovered that the latest pre-release version of XP SP3 brings a whopping 10% performance gain over XP SP2 with Office 2007. Vista SP1 and XP SP3 are both scheduled for the first half of next year.

Devil Mountain ran its OfficeBench suite of performance benchmarks on a laptop equipped with Office 2007, Microsoft's latest application suite. The notebook -- the same unit used in the Vista/Vista SP1 tests earlier -- featured a 2.0-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory. The results reported that XP SP3 delivered a 10% speed increase over SP2, the service pack released in 2004.

According to the Office performance benchmarks, Windows XP SP3 is also considerably faster than Vista SP1. "None of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than two times slower than the most current builds of its older sibling," said Barth.