Is Vista SP1 really the shot in the arm your Vista system needs? We"ve spent many hours strapped to our benchmarking system in a caffeine and pizza fueled haze to uncover these very interesting results. In some areas, such as network file copying, Vista SP1 is dramatically faster -- up to 86%.
Our scenario was a home user running Vista Home Premium on a fast, low-latency network with decent PC hardware. All file copy tests were initiated from the main machine. Each system used the latest available vendor (non-Microsoft) drivers and the November release of DirectX. No modifications were made to the operating system, so as to represent as closely as possible the configuration of an OEM machine.
We asked Microsoft why this was and they provided a very detailed technical explanation.