[Coco] CoCo2, a speed demon?

[Diego Barizo]

After reading a few times in different websites that the CoCo was a slow 
computer (I guess ppl is used to MHz=Speed), I decided to do some 
benchmarking.
Remembering some tests from an old magazine, I tested some BASIC 
programs, loops with thousands of gotos, gosubs, ifs...
After a POKE 65497,0 , my CoCo 3 easily outruns a Model III, a Model 
100, an Atari 800XL, and comes close to a Tandy 1100 PC
But my surprise came today, while testing a CoCo 2. Un-POKEd, it is a 
lot faster than the 3. When POKEd, they come about even....
I found this on my POKEs list. Could this be the cause?

POKE &HA1C1,&H39:FOR F=&HA1CA to &HA1C1
STEP -1:READA:POKE F,A:NEXT F:DATA 121,39,
72,67,0,255,182,2,255,127
put as the first line of your program
it will speed up your computer by about
15%!! It patches the keyboard scan routine

FOR to 10000 A+1 to 5000 ? “A”*1000 Goto next 5000 Gosub IF/THEN
Model III 27 38 24 21 29 36
Model 100 32 39 50 20 24 36
CoCo2 15 24 10 11 15 40
CoCo2 Poke 11 18 7 8 11 30
CoCo3 22 31 31 19 26 47
CoCo3 Poke 11 16 15 9 13 24
Atari 800XL 24 26 20 20 25 22
Tandy 1100 7 10 21 5 7 10