Slower, anyway. Among the 10 systems, SP2 resulted in a performance hit of 3 to 22 percent on eight of the 10 machines. Granted, two saw small performance increases, but the average decrease in performance was a whopping 9 percent. (All tests are based on Sysmark 2002's Business Productivity test.)Too bad that they haven't tested SP2 yet with any other benchmark software.
We asked Microsoft if it was aware that there was a performance issue after upgrading to SP2, a spokesperson replied that Microsoft "takes all feedback on the performance of Windows XP SP2 seriously. At this time we are not aware of performance degradation on PCs running Windows XP SP2." That's funny, we thought we just told them that there was a performance problem. Watch for a thorough examination of SP2 performance in an upcoming issue of Mobile PC.
More info at Mobile PC