How to Make Windows Faster than Linux

TechSource ^ | 15 July 2010 | jun auza

[ShadowAce]

I honestly do not know the answer to your question. I'm not intimately familiar with IE8, as I use firefox.

I don't think it could hurt, though.

dayglored may be able to answer your question better than I can.

[fretzer]

The laptop (Thinkpad T61) currently has 3GB, 2.4GHz CoreDuo. It’s set up for triple boot linux/vista/xp but it spends most of the time in Gentoo linux. I’ve assigned 1.5GB to one of the VMs and 512MB to the other. I have a 20GB disk and 10GB virtual disk assigned respectively. Both are running XP SP3. I usually don’t run the VMs simultaneously. The CPUs idle at around 4%. There’s very little paging unless I’m doing something very memory intensive such as a large graphics model of some sort. In that case a physical machine is more appropriate but for general every day use, the VMs work great. I’ve also virtualized two domain controllers on another linux server. The VMs are running Server 2003 Enterprise.

[markman46]

OH wow, Ok, I am running PCLinuxos with 4 Gb ram, I run win7 on the vm and gave it 2 gbs ram, I am thinking of getting Mythtv up and running on a different machine and running win home server on a vm

[dayglored]

>> Question? While online I receive the Upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Is it worth it?

> I honestly do not know the answer to your question. I'm not intimately familiar with IE8, as I use firefox. I don't think it could hurt, though. dayglored may be able to answer your question better than I can.

Thanks for the referral, ShadowAce.

IE8 is a considerable improvement over IE7 (which itself was a vast improvement over IE6 for other reasons, mainly security). I consider it worth upgrading to IE8 primarily because it has a much higher degree of compatibility with standards.

It's more secure than IE7, without becoming dysfunctional about it.

It has a "compatibility mode" which makes it render more like IE6/7 for those pages where coders unwisely used Microsoft's incompatible features (and therefore I call it "incompatibility mode").

Overall I consider it a win, and recommend it if you use Internet Explorer.

Now, all the above aside, I must confess that I dislike IE (all versions), strongly prefer Firefox (which I use almost exclusively on Windows, Mac OS-X and Linux), and I only use IE under duress (e.g. MSDN downloads and other MS pages that require ActiveX). And I think it's wonderful that on Win7 they no longer bring up IE for Windows Updates (at least, not explicitly).