Windows Vista SP2 Beta vs Vista SP1:Battle of the Service Packs

Copying Tests

All the tests were done 3 times and results were averaged and rounded off to nearest whole number.

The percent increases in performance is shown in the graphs as percent.

Increases in synthetic benchmarks is one thing, but increase in real world performance is what matters most. To see if there were any increases in real world performance, we formed our own custom test. The idea behind these tests is to emulate a real world usage, where the user is likely to notice an increase in performance and in the everyday tasks that a user does.

Test 1– We copied a folder of 8096 Wallpapers from one SATA hard drive to another SATA drive and measured the time it took with a stop watch.

This test shows a minor increase in copying performance, which can be considered within the margin of error. It is nothing to get too excited about here.

Test 2 – Our second copying test involves the same wallpaper folder from one SATA hard drive to external hard drive through a firewire connection.

WOW, this test shows a 20% improvement. Vista SP2 Beta is faster by 18 seconds at copying to a firewire drive.

Test 3 – Our third test is a measure of copying and compression performance. In this test, the same wallpaper folder was compressed with 7-Zip 4.62 and the 7z file was made on the other SATA drive.

This test also shows an increase in performance with Vista SP2 Beta, as the previous tests have shown. Vista SP2 Beta is faster by 30 seconds at copying and compressing at the same time. It looks like compression performance has improved. We will verify this by Winrar’s Benchark later in this review.