I’ve been hearing a lot about how XP SP2 slowed stuff down for people. Generally I’ve tended to class these folk as “edge cases” or those who:

1. Didn’t do the compatibility test first
2. Were using apps that had known issues
3. Sadly, slipped through the holes in the above 2
4. Nobody had called Microsoft for the Free support offered with the SP2 upgrade

But, I didn’t really have any data to support this. It was a gut feeling (and based on experience: those who were complaining generally hadn’t done their homework).

Well, here is a very indepth review into SP2′s performance.

Bottom line?

After looking at the results, one thing is certain: You have more to gain than you to to lose by installing SP2. Performance is for the most part identical to SP1, except in a few cases. In those cases, SP2 was actually faster! [...] What surprized me was how much gaming performance was increased by upgrading to SP2 and DirectX 9c!