According to many testers of the latest build of Service Pack 3 for Microsoft Windows XP, users can expect a performance increase over the current Service Pack 2 versions of XP. The performance increase is said to make XP running Service Pack 3 faster than Windows Vista running Service Pack 1, which is not exactly good news for Microsoft. According to reports the performance boost can be as much as 10% with XP SP3 over XP SP2.

Microsoft isn’t saying much, other than development continues and nothing is set in stone with either of the service packs. Both service packs are not expected to be released until sometime in the first quarter of next year. While Vista needs the service pack as soon as possible to held address the issues of the new operating system, the Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has been delayed several times; but this has become necessary, if for no other purpose than to roll up over an average of 100MB of patches and fixes that have been distributed since Service Pack 2 for XP.