This could be a very helpful upgrade :D

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1299&tag=nl.e622

February 12th, 2008
Some systems showing incredible SP1 performance boost - Day 6
Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 4:16 pm

Some systems onto which I’m installing Windows Vista SP1 are showing significant performance gains.

One system in particular on which I’m seeing a significant is the AMD Phenom system which I have in the lab.

Here’s the spec of that system:

Phenom 9700 quad-core processor
ATi Radeon 3850 graphics card with 256MB RAM
ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard
2GB (2 x 1GB) Corsair Dominator CM2X1024-8500C5D RAM
Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM 150GB primary hard drive
Western Digital Caviar 7,200RPM 500GB secondary hard drive
The other day I carried out some file transfer benchmarks on this system and then installed SP1 and benched it again and I noticed some significant improvements. To carry out these benchmarks I used two set of files to transfer:

A single 644MB file
A folder contains numerous files and folders (3495 files / 30 folders) totaling 5.16GB
I carried out a number of tests, moving, compressing and extracting these files. All these tasks were performed three times and the results averaged. In all but one of the tests Vista SP1 showed gains over Vista RTM, and in some tests these improvements were so significant that I reloaded the system and carried out both tests again and go almost identical results.

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ANOTHER OPINION ON SP1

Windows Vista SP1 Performance Investigation
http://www.infoaddict.com/post/title/windows-vista-sp1-performance-investigation/index.html