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.
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.
I don't think you need a miracle just a better product that is produced by thinking and hard work.
If that were the case, Xerox and Novell would both be market leaders in the computer industry. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it all boils down to marketing, pricing, and getting the product into the collective minds of those who make the purchasing decisions.
Unfortunately the quality of the product (unless it's completely unusable) doesn't really matter all that much.
Mark
Walmart If i remember correctly tried selling very low cost linux machines at $200 each! http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1108/
Problem is they didn’t sell well so Walmart pulled them : http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/10/wal-mart-is-pulling-plug-on-in-store-gpc-experiment/. If Linux was better ( had all plug and play drivers etc.) then it would unseat microsoft and the fact that walmart was selling LInux PCs at $200 a pop could have provided the push Linux needed to unseat Microsoft. Linux is just too hard to use for the average joe. FYI Wal-Mart is still selling these $200 linux machines online but not in their stores. So an average Joe would rather pay $700 for a Microsoft machine that is easier to use than a $200 Linux machine that they find difficult to use. So Microsoft here still provides the better product.
Firefox however does seem to making headway against Internet Explorer. Again a better product unseating a Microsoft product.
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