Although Microsoft has indicated a strong disapproval of benchmarking tests involving development milestones of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the temptation is simply too big to ignore.

And the Redmond company has done little not to invite the operating system measuring contest that throws Vista and XP together in the performance arena. After the tests performed by the Devil Mountain Software company involving beta releases of Vista SP1 and XP SP3, another unofficial benchmark is available carried out between Vista SP1 RC Refresh and Windows XP SP2.

The machines used for the testing featured a Core 2 Duo E6600 3.2GHz (8*400), Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3, 8GB DDR2-800 4-5-4-15, GeForce 8800GT 512MB (stock), Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB