[CodeMasterPhilzar]

Unfortunately for the MS faithful, I've heard from some tech analysts that Win 7 is basically Vista SP3. Me, I'm an admitted Linux guy. Actually, I give MS kudos for not making W7 slower than Vista. I can't remember MS ever releasing an OS that was faster and/or less resource hungry than its predecessor. But Linux is still my OS...and less resource hungry than even XP.

I've mentioned this before, but I'll repeat it because it is so remarkable. I have a 3 year old Dell that I just put Ubuntu 9.04 on with the new ext4 filesystem. It now boots from the bios to a sign-on in 15 sec, and from password to usable screen in another 10. I'm amazed.

[CodeToad]

“I can’t remember MS ever releasing an OS that was faster and/or less resource hungry than its predecessor. “

Windows XP is faster than Winows 2000. There were serious enhancements to the kernel in XP over 2000.

[steve86]

Ext4 doesn’t seem all that much faster for reads. But sequential writes are impressively fast.

http://www.linuxinsight.com/first_benchmarks_of_the_ext4_file_system.html

Speedboot can make quite a difference, but it is unfortunately disabled on my laptop for some reason. Many users report similar. Machines that can use it see an improvement of say 7 seconds out of 20 (around 30%).

[KoRn]

"I have a 3 year old Dell that I just put Ubuntu 9.04 on with the new ext4 filesystem. It now boots from the bios to a sign-on in 15 sec, and from password to usable screen in another 10. I'm amazed."

Nice!!! I'm considering a move to Linux myself. I haven't been doing any PC gaming since getting my PS3 last year, now there's really no reason for me to even run Windows.

[sionnsar]

Ubuntu 9.04 faster than 8.10? I just recently switched from Kubuntu to Xubuntu...

[snowsislander]

I have a 3 year old Dell that I just put Ubuntu 9.04 on with the new ext4 filesystem. It now boots from the bios to a sign-on in 15 sec, and from password to usable screen in another 10. I'm amazed.

Yes, I have been trying out Ubuntu 9.04 as a virtual machine and it is nice.

[antiRepublicrat]

Unfortunately for the MS faithful, I've heard from some tech analysts that Win 7 is basically Vista SP3.

Close. Windows Vista is NT 6.0, and Windows 7 is NT 6.1. It's a dot release, just a bit more than a service pack. For comparison, Windows 2000 was NT 5.0 and XP was NT 5.1. Vista was built off the NT 5.2 branch, which was 64-bit XP and Server 2003.

Honestly, Vista didn't deserve a whole number release, NT 5.3 would have sufficed. It was planned to be much more that would have deserved such a release, but Microsoft scaled it way back. Development had already been going for five years with nothing to show for it yet, so they had to release something.

[killermosquito]

I just received a used Thinkpad A30. I think the CPU is 1 Ghz and 256 megs of RAM. What flavor of Linux would you suggest I install?

[GATOR NAVY]

It now boots from the bios to a sign-on in 15 sec, and from password to usable screen in another 10. I'm amazed.

I just checked my times because I thought mine was pretty fast. Mine boots from the bios to a sign-on in 18 sec, and from password to usable screen in 20 more, maybe less if I wasn't counting the wireless card connecting.

My motherboard burned out last month and I had a choice. Buy a new box that would most likely have Vista or rebuild the one I had. Since I had a new 350GB SATA HD, and all the other hardware was still in good shape, I went for buying a new mobo, CPU and RAM. I reinstalled the XP SP3 I had and I'm very happy with the results. I'm not seeing Vista or W7 in my future.