Posted on 04/06/2008 5:31:58 AM PDT by Notary Sojac
With the market preparing for the next -- and final -- phase of the life of Windows XP with the forthcoming general availability of Service Pack 3, the old operating system continues to show itself to be a spry performer. In head-to-head tests between Windows XP Service Pack 3 Beta (Release Candidate 2) against Windows Vista Service Pack 1, it's clear that XP still holds a measurable performance advantage overMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s next-generation desktop operating system.
Our CRN Test Center conducted a faceoff-type of performance evaluation. Testing was done on two identical desktops: HP (NYSE:HPQ)'s rp5700 model with a single 160 GB SATA drive on each machine, 1.8 GHz dual-core Intel (NSDQ:INTC) processors and 1 GB RAM on both.
There were no extraneous applications installed on the two computers, just the software needed to perform benchmark testing and OpenOffice.org's productivity suite. Screensavers and desktop image backgrounds were disabled as well. The XP desktop was installed with beta-release service pack 3 RC2 and the Vista desktop with Vista Ultimate service pack 1 plus all current Vista updates.
One of the first tasks tested was a simple restart. XP SP3 took 35 seconds to restart. Vista SP1 took 58 seconds. Just to reiterate, this was a test done without any other programs loading like anti-virus or network policies, so "real-world" times may be slower.
A simple file copy operation was performed next. A 1.25 GB file was copied from a network share to each desktop. This proved to be one area where Vista did show some strength: the copy time for XP was 2 minutes and 54 seconds; for Vista SP1: 2 minutes and 29 seconds.
After that, it went downhill for Vista.
The next test performed utilized Primate Labs' Geekbench. Geekbench tests the performance of the processor and the memory. Keep in mind, with Geekbench, the higher the number, the better the performance. Benchmarks were run five times for each OS and the results were subsequently averaged. XP SP3 results were 2052.6, Vista SP1's were 1994.0. Vista testing was re-run with the Aero desktop disabled, as previous testing showed that the enabling of Aero contributed to overhead. Vista SP1 results fared a bit better with Aero disabled than with Aero enabled, the results were 2018.2. But that was still lower performance than XP.
CPU Utilization in XP SP3, when browsing using IE7 hit a maximum 56 percent. Opening a spreadsheet and a few word processing files had the CPU hovering at around 22 percent.
Browsing the same pages in Vista SP1 and opening the same files, had the CPU hit a max at 60 percent, not a substantial increase from XP's max. the paging file for both PCs was set to the same level 1524-3043 max. This is where a significant difference was seen. In XP, the page file usage hovered at 260-270 MB, whether browsing or opening files. In Vista, the page file usage averaged 555 MB, half the physical memory.
This lends credibility to assertions that Vista still requires more physical memory than XP to run optimally. The bottom line: XP still rules, performance wise, over Vista. Vista is certainly outfitted for enhanced security, but with new features in XP SP3 like Network Access protection, XP SP3 does not seem like a slouch in the security department either.
Microsoft is pushing Vista, hard, over XP. But it's increasingly clear that it will have to address the performance drop that takes place in the migration from XP to Vista. The scenario is reminiscent of XPs phasing out the then popular Windows 2000 desktop. Microsoft managed to shore up XP and make it the reliable product it is today.
Hopefully, that is what the future holds for Vista as well. Stay tuned.
ping
You know, Microsoft has done about as good a job, shooting itself in the foot over this, as I have ever seen. I expect when my Win2000 pro, and my wife’s XP gets too long in the tooth, we’ll be learning Linux. I’ve just heard too many bad things about Vista to even consider it.
Linux has its own problems. Staying with XP is best, but we need somebody like Google to get into the OS market.
It is a memory hog, and drivers for some hardware and programs are still in need, but as an operating system, at least for me, it works fine.
I do a lot of database management and online gaming(World of Warcraft,COD4,etc). My primary system is an older P4 H/T 3.4 with 2Gigs of mem, it runs fine with Vista Pro, and manages not only the house server, but the router, wireless, and movie/music downloads. I can run as many windows open for work as needed and see no degradation in performance.
Vista suffers from program compatibilities and a lot of hardware drivers that are not as yet written. As with any MS product, and I have been using MS since DOS 3, there are always development bugs. This same 'crucifiction' of Vista occured when XP came out and now with corrections over the years, XP is fairly reliable(Blue Screen of Death anyone?).
Expect Vista to be in that same vein and improve over the coming years. The 64-bit operators I know are loving Vista, and want more programing made available for it.
What really put me off a few years ago, on Linux, was the Uber-Geeky depths I had to plumb to get answers, drivers, and other stuff to work properly.
When it reaches a stage where you can just install it, and it works with your hardware without much tweaking, it will give MS a run for its money.
Now the idea of another large company. like Google, developing another OS is interesting- there's got to be a market for it.
> Linux has its own problems.
Primarily just some key apps.
> Staying with XP is best, ...
Anyone not on it needs to act by 30 June 2008,
the last sale date for XP for most uses.
Mafiasoft has reportedly recently extended the
life of XP beyond that only for low-end laptops
that can’t really run Vista.
> ... but we need somebody like Google to get
> into the OS market.
In my case, if Adobe and IMSI got onto Linux,
Windoze would already be outta here.
Back in Windows 3.1 days, IBM came up with a brilliant idea called OS/2 for Windows. Within a few weeks MS came up with a patch to fix some esoteric problem with Windows 3.1, that by some cosmic coincidence broke OS/2 for Windows.
The lesson is it will take a miracle to unseat MS. They are positively evil and make shoddy products that make GM cars look like high quality.
So, I loaded the Vista sound theme onto my XP box. Now mine sounds like Vista but plays like XP.
That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.
I guess MS needs to release a service pack to really foul up XP, so everyone will be willing to drink the Vista kool-aid.
I don't think you need a miracle just a better product that is produced by thinking and hard work.
Like someone said Google can certainly unseat MS with a new operating system.
A single indidivual can do it. All it takes is a breakthrough.
I am working on an programming that takes advantage of multi -core chips like the new Intel 6 core chip. The person who solves this problem will certainly take down Microsoft because microsoft has not figured out how to do parallel programming with multiple core chips as evidenced by Vista's poor performance on dual-core processor chips.
Yes these are probably delusions of grandeur on my part. But you never know until you try.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1987809/posts
“Intel Corp. today announced that it expects to ship a six-core processor to resellers in the second half of this year.
With 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of Level 3 cache, the six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, will be built with Intel's new 45 nanometer technology, according to Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.
“The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance,” Gelsinger said during a press briefing today about the company's product road map and its upcoming Intel Developer Forum, slated to be held next month in Shanghai. “We're quite excited about it.”
Intuit needs to get some Linux compatibility as well.
Microsoft has already backed away from that time.
> Intuit needs to get some Linux compatibility as well.
Mr.Bill might be paying them not to.
And not just Intuit, either.
Quicken and QuickBooks, of course, arguably
have a FOSS competitor in Gnucash (which I’m
going to try this year).
But TurboTax may not.
However, all of these are not computationally
intensive applications. There is no need for
them to be compilations native to specific
operating systems and ISAs.
If I were Intuit, I’d be looking at recoding
them in Java, so they’d run in a browser on
any platform.
And yes, TTax can be run in a browser today,
as long as you trust Intuit with your info.
Of course, if you don’t ya gotta wonder what
it shares when phoning home anyway.
Every OS has its own problems. The learning curve for contemporary Linux distributions is no worse, and possibly easier than it is introducing a new user to Windows. I made the transition from Win2k (GREAT Os!) to Linux painlessly. My 60 year old mother runs it with only administration from me. If you possess enough technical knowledge to format a hard drive and install an OS, modern Linux is fully within your grasp.
Free, secure, and fully featured, heck even the eye candy of Vista without the performance hit, if that's your preference.
> Microsoft has already backed away from that time.
You stopped reading what I wrote.
Here’s the fine print restated:
“Windows XP gets two-year extension”
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/73301,windows-xp-gets-twoyear-extension.aspx
“But the extension will apply only to extremely
specialised low-end PCs, and not to common consumer models.”
Otherwise, Intel’s new “Atom” might be out just
in time to have no Windows that runs on it.
If you want to build a new desktop or upgrade
one to XP, act before 2008-06-30.
But no, I would not be surprised if MS further
relents, and re-extends XP generally. I see no
strong indicators that they have the Vista
performance issues under control.
Can you import a Quickbooks file seamlessly to Gnucash?
I think Dell wants to keep selling the system and I think Microsoft will go along with them. If you look on ebay you will find an xp system alway sells for more than vista!
> Can you import a Quickbooks file seamlessly to Gnucash?
Dunno.
It appears to handle Quicken, if exported to .QIF from
a 2006 version or earlier.
Try some web searching.
The GC site is: http://www.gnucash.org/
See also for links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnucash
Hey the application I work on has pulled that one. It’s pretty funny but apparently a fairly hard one to get, we managed to get it when trying to manipulate a registry entry before our install had put it there.
Yeah of course Vista is going to underperform against and older platform when it is purposely derailed with 1 gig of ram and a slow processor, yep thats a fair fight.
1 GB is twice what MS says it needs. Of course lets look at the problem of a non-server OS that the maker admits needs half a gig of RAM.
Exactly but the anti-MS bots who don’t know jack completely ignored the fact that the test used less ram and less cpu than what is normally bought in todays computers which Vista was designed for.
Being the minimum for what it takes to run and being what it takes to run good is two different things, if going by your premise then the XP box should have had 512mb of ram instead of the 1 gig, which would have been twice what XP’s minimum requirements were.
Part of the problem is that the industry as a whole, and this really is not just a MS crime, lie like rugs about system requirements. In an effort to get more people to buy their product they put forth numbers that are just a fiction, sure most apps/ OSes will start on a system they speced but that’s about it. XPs recommended is 128MB, which is laughable, anybody that tries to run XP with less than a gig is being silly. Vista’s recommendation is 512MB, again laughable, some folks say 2GB is fine for Vista, my usage says don’t even think about it until you hit 4. 4X to 8X seems to be MS’s fudge factor, take what they say multiply it by somewhere between 4 and 8 and you’ll actually find out what the product needs.
Again this isn’t just an MS thing, the recommendation on EA games is silly, their fudge is 2 to 4. Even the app I work on, what we say is about half the system I’d be willing to even try to work the app on. Somebody should start a website tracking the difference between their recommended and user recommendation, kind of like the sites that track MPG stats.
Of course to be fair we got that message on a 2K3 box, I think the error comes out of .Net or the C runtime, not the OS directly.
2 GB is more than enough for Vista and most apps on it, I play Oblivion with that amount of ram on my Vista box. But back to the point, if you want to have a fair comparison of the two you have to set up things respective to what ‘era’ of computing they were built on. Obviously XP is going to perform exceptionally well with 1 gig and a 1.8 Ghz dual core processor, but Vista being the newer and beefier OS needs more as it was designed for the future as was XP was when it came out so doggedly slow in 2001 and didnt hit it stride for a couple of years. So comparing the two is disingenious at best if they don’t have comparable parts in respective to their system requirements.
Hmm. Appears to handle QIF files, (quicken) but not QBW (quickbooks).
Looks like they’re gunning for Intuit though. Quickbooks compatibility is only a matter of time. Good.
I agree with this in the case of PC gaming. The game developers have apparently been getting kickbacks from the video card companies for a decade.
But an operating system has as its essential task a consistent interface for file access, keyboard, video, networking and printing. That's about it. There is no reason why an improved OS should not be able to run faster than its predecessors, and "Brand A" has shown that from time to time that can be done.
I would not even think of moving to Vista until the hardware that will "run Vista screamingly fast" drops down to that price range.
I've always installed MS operating systems about 2-3 years after they come on the market. But I will pass on Vista regardless because of (1) the DRM issue and (2) the lack of any compelling features in Vista.
Vista should run screamingly fast with your setup, well depending on the gpu. But installing a OS after a year or two of its first release is always a good idea, I however just love being an early adopter.
Oh, and I believe I read somewhere that DirectX 10 is quite the memory hog also. Your right though, it is mainly for gamers, but they LOVE it...
> Hmm. Appears to handle QIF files, (quicken) ...
Yes, but Intuit is apparently moving away from QIF to QFX,
and they charge for access to QFX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QIF
> ... but not QBW (quickbooks).
Don’t count on that happening. Intuit is unlikely to
open the format, and GC is unlikely to reverse-engr
it. Look for some advice on how to generate QB reports
in comma-delimited formats, to .txt file, that could
then be batched into GC.
> Looks like they’re gunning for Intuit though.
Not really. The point of the GC effort, as with most
FOSS software, is to provide a useful tool in an
open way. Deliberate competition with commercial
products is rarely the goal. It’s just a side effect.
> Quickbooks compatibility is only a matter of time. Good.
Assume that this is not the case, and that others have
made the transition, and have write-ups on how.
In any event, all computer users need to focus on
getting their important data OUT of proprietary formats.
Increasingly, the app providers are moving to toward
charging you recurring fees to just read your own data.
QuickBooks has been time-bombed for years. No subscription
or upgrade, no new tax tables.
And then there are the apps that vanish altogether, fail
in the market or get bought and killed, and your
legacy copy is soon unrunnable on newer operating systems.
Where I work, we have key spreadsheets that are in a now
unreadable file format. Any I work on get converted to or
created in .ods.
Hmmm. Thanks for the perspective.
I hate it when that happens!
I love my W2K. Compared to many OS's it's frigging bullet-proof.
I find the best Windows XP security measure is to boot up without admin privileges, and to do all my program installs and internet activity inside a VirtualBox VM.
Roger that. Win2000 really is the best thing Microsoft ever released.
Yes and no. Sure on the one hand the machines an OS was “designed” for give a fairer comparison, but real world usage is on flat machines. You’re going to buy a machine with a set of statistics and you’re going to want the most out of that machine, so comparing the two on identical hardware is reasonable. And they did make the machine better than MS says is the minimum for Vista, so it’s not like they cut it’s knees out from under it.
I agree with you about Linux. It is great for servers, but it needs years of labor and billions of dollars invested in R&D before it will be ready as a mainstream consumer operating system. A company like Dell or Google or IBM could make the level of investment that Desktop Linux requires to make it a decent product, but so far they've shown no willingness to do so.
In my opinion, for the foreseeable future, the best OS for most computer users is Mac OS X.
The BASIC interpreter Microsoft released in 1978 was truly amazing, with hand-tuned machine language code designed by Bill Gates himself - but it's been downhill since then in terms of code quality.
(not a Google OS, but it looks like it's trying to be one)
>> we need somebody like Google to get into the OS market.
> (not a Google OS, but it looks like it’s trying to be one)
“gOS is developed by Good OS LLC out of Los Angeles. It’s based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 and runs the Enlightenment E17 interface instead of KDE or Gnome. Despite not being created by Google, the focus of gOS is Google’s online applications such as GMail, Google News, Google Maps, Google Calendar, YouTube, etc. It’s a neat concept for a Linux distribution, but how practical is it? We’ll find out in this review.”
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2219310,00.asp
Google hasn’t sent them a Cease and Desist, so one might
conclude that the big G hasn’t any immediate plans for
a Google o.s.
I had the same thought just last night while watching a program on how Google started, etc.
I thought, "When Google decides to get into the OS business, it could be the move that eventually cripples Microsoft."
It's common knowledge that Vista has to have 2gb of ram as a sort of a floor. Memory is cheap enough now that a claim of something like this to be a reasonable test is BS.
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