Windows XP Significantly Outperforms Vista, Tests Show

Information Week ^ | November 26, 2007 | Paul McDougall

[Zakeet]

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.

In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft's newest operating system.

Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new Service Pack 1 beta package, is shown to be a laggard.

"The hoped for performance fixes [from Vista SP1] that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized," said Devil Mountain researchers, in a blog post summarizing their results.

The researchers compared patched and unpatched versions of Vista and XP running Microsoft Office on a dual-core Dell notebook. The results revealed the time taken to complete Office productivity tasks such as the creation of a compound document and presentation materials.

Devil Mountain researchers ran a mix of tests comparing existing versions of the operating systems -- the original Vista and XP SP2 -- and versions that had been patched with the latest updates -- Vista SP1 beta and XP SP3 beta. Tests were also run on machines with 1 Gbyte and 2 Gbytes of memory.

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests -- regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer. In fact, XP proved to be roughly twice as fast as Vista in most of the tests.

[SunkenCiv]

a 3.0 GHz 8-core Xeon Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM

Sure, but you probably only have two terabytes of hard drive in the thing. Obviously a casual user. ;') ;')

[HAL9000]

I know the “mv” unix command worked and I have no idea why it wasn’t used.

I'll speculate that mv wasn't used because it doesn't handle forked file structures (i.e., a resource fork) correctly, and it might have issues with bundles/packages.

[PA Engineer]

LOL. That is great.

[rmlew]

XP SP3 is comming out soon with many of the security features of Vista. I see no reason anyone should use Vista.

[Blue Highway]

I used a Commodore 64 from 1981 through 1988 or so. A whopping 39k of usable memory. Never did a single upgrade to it...OS, RAM, disc...nothing.

And yet, the software and games for the system continually improved from year to year even though the platform, itself, did not improve.

They still have a users group making Atari 2600 "homebrew" cartridges today using only 4k or 8k(bank switched) cartridges.

Atari Homebrew Cartridge reviews on CNET (VIDEO LINK)

Amazing stuff they squeezed onto such a small space back in the 70's and even moreso now with the tricks they've learned to write even more concise coding.

I can't find it right now, but someone over at Atari Age made a primitive "windows-esq" fun utility environment for the Atari using the standard 4k cart. It had the pointer you used a joystick for in place of the mouse that it was trying to represent. I had desktop icons, and there may have been a game of pong as one of the icon you clicked on.

Another cool utility was a synth cartridge using it's 4 voice registers to create some interesting sounds/music style samples. Sounded contemporary evn with the limited sound registers the Atari was known for. Check it out.

[Blue Highway]

Then it isn't configured well... If you shut it off at night anyway... 98 leaks mem if you leave it run...

But it is simple and really very fast on new hardware.

Explain this please. Not familiar with the idea of leaving the computer on that it will leak memory, or even know what that means.

[Blue Highway]

I’ve only read up to post 89 so far, but I have a feeling Swordmaker will be here with the Apple posse very shortly, if he hasn’t already made an appearance. haha

[Blue Highway]

With the UAC and Aero turned off in Vista, it functions close to the older classic style of XP.

[Blue Highway]

What is the current version of W2K? I know I have at least 1 iteration of that OS on one of my hard drives. Is it SP4 still? I think I’ve had that CD for 3 or 4 years now.

[Blue Highway]

Groan, like Perfect Stranger said, you can wipe the drive and simply install XP and you’d only need to find the chipset drivers and specific hardware drivers to re-install with XP. If you go with the generic drivers that XP has you won’t even have to do that much, but the chipset driver would be recommended anyway.

[Blue Highway]

I've built five new machines in the past year, and set each of them up to run on DOS, Win 98SE, and XP pro. as triple boot options. 98 is still the best as far as ease of use and speed. XP is just there for the rare program that isn't available in a Win 98 version.

I like the dual or triple boot options as well. Do you have a hard time finding hardware drivers that will work for Win98/98SE in newer computers? I remember having a hard time finding the drivers for a Matrox Millenium G450 dual display video card (which was old at the time) when I installed it on a computer running 98. I had to used a hacked version of XP for it to even display more than 16 colors.

[Blue Highway]

Yes you can use their existing patches, but it's not as easy to do as with Windows 2000. Service Pack 1 of Win98 included IE 4. If you made a clean install of Win98, you'd have to install the original with IE 3; reboot several times; install SP1 with IE 4; reboot; install IE 6 SP2; reboot. With Windows 2000 you can update the original installation disk to apply all the service packs. I did a clean reinstall on a dual P3 Dell with Windows 2000, and it took much less time than having to install all the updates separately.

That reminds me of why I like using XP now as I got tired of the constant reboots with any updates going back to Win 95 OSR2. I kept my CyberMax 233 MMX AMD K6 going from Dec 96 till about 3 years ago. Constant updating with a Promise Ultra ATA 66 card to run bigger drives, Adaptec SCSI card to run my Syjet 1.5 gig cartridges, the dreaded DDO Dynamic Disk Overlay I had to install on every hard drive that I owned that was larger than the 4.3 gb drive it came with initially, and all the tricks to get my CD RW drives installed from a blank state as my BIOS wouldn't recognize it from DOS. I'd have to use an older CD reader drive to install 98 then bring in the CDRW after it was up and running. XP simplified things a lot!

[scripter]

I recently purchased a new PC with Vista, dual core 3.2Ghz and 3Gb of memory. It's a nice system but it's not very fast considering the hardware.

One day I came home from work and found a message that said:

Reboot required
A change occurred to your Windows license
You must restart your computer or Windows will stop working

First it killed all the apps I had running and only had the above message in a little window.

While I wish my favorite software (logos.com) would run on a Linux box, our house is moving to Apple. The kids will get a 20 inch iMac, the wife a 24 inch iMac and I'll get the Pro. I'm going to reload the Windows systems with Linux and use them as web and database servers. No more Windows products for us.

[Blue Highway]

The Apple posse has arrived. Good to see ya fellas. :-)

[Blue Highway]

How likely is it to get 98Se running on a computer designed to run Vista. Like a AMD Athlon 64 processor?

[Blue Highway]

So can you use the “move” command with the latest OSX without this bug? I hate having to copy, and then go back and delete the original once the copy is complete. That said I have lost data on my old computer that way when some gremlin occured right when I was transferring a folder over 1gb of data. (NOT RESPONDING) lockup but the data was corrupted and gone. It was back when I was using 98 (before I upgraded to 98SE) and on an old computer that shouldn’t have been able to keep running that long, since it was running on duct tape and fumes at that point.

[ShadowAce]

What does logos.com have that Blue Letter Bible doesn't? I use BLB all the time.

[Swordmaker]

Re: move command without bug?

Yes... supposedly that has been fixed in OSX.5.1.

But your comment about disliking the final step of deleting the file that was copied to another volume is the exact reason that hackers enabled the undocumented move command on the Mac. Switchers were used to having it on Windows and missed that minor convenience. Mac users had not had the move command and didn’t miss it. Incidentally, “drag and drop” between volumes did not cause the loss of data, only using the undocumented keyboard command or the hacked menus with the added command did.

[editor-surveyor]

"Do you have a hard time finding hardware drivers that will work for Win98/98SE in newer computers?"

Mostly, no, the manufacturers still provide 98SE drivers in most cases, but occasionally they still don't work, in which case there are web sites where you can post a need and often someone will come up with one. USB flash devices, other than Sandisk and AData, tend to be a problem, especially if they are more than 4GB.

[Paleo Conservative]

What is the current version of W2K? I know I have at least 1 iteration of that OS on one of my hard drives. Is it SP4 still? I think I’ve had that CD for 3 or 4 years now.

The last W2K service pack is SP4 which was released in 2003. Microsoft has since released rollups that consolidate all the updates since the last service pack. The great thing is that if you have your original installation disk, it's not difficult to turn it into an ISO image then apply the service pack and rollups to that image to create a new updated installation ISI disk image that can be burned onto a new CD. This cuts down on the time it takes to install windows from scratch.

I really don't like having to install an obsolete, unstable, and unsupported version of the operating system before I can get the latest version installed. It was a rather serious issue with Windows NT4. The service packs on NT4 weren't just some minor bug fixes. There were some drastic changes in features. I completely reinstalled NT from a freshly formatted disk when I upgraded from my original Pentium Pro-200 to dual 333 Mhz Pentium II overdrives. About a year later I upgraded to Windows 2000 with a clean install, and I've never had to reinstall the operating system on that machine.