Office 2007 SP1 Yields Modest Performance Gains

During our most recent round of testing we covered Windows Vista with the Service Pack 1 Release Candidate bits running both Office 2007 and Office 2003. Now that Service Pack 1 for Office 2007 has been released we decided to revisit the tests with the updated bits for Word, Excel and PowerPoint in place.

Once again, we ran the tests on the same 2GHz Core 2 Duo Laptop (Dell XPS M1710) with 2GB of memory. Test methodology consisted of booting Vista, running an initial pass of OfficeBench, then running OfficeBench in a 10-iteration loop and recording the average loop time across the iterations.

The net result: A 3% improvement in OfficeBench completion times.

It would seem that, unlike the Vista team - which has the habit of over-promising and under-delivering - when the Office team talks about a performance boost they actually provide one. And while the results are far from earth-shattering - Vista SP1 + Office 2007 SP1 is still nearly 2x slower than the combination of Windows XP SP3 + Office 2003 - it's at least a step in the right direction.

Note: You can grab your free copy of OfficeBench, plus the rest of the DMS Clarity Suite tools, from the exo.performance.network web site. Just register for your free portal account, hook-up a couple of systems and help us build the world's first global repository of computer performance-related knowledge and data.