Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

 

The basic summary seems to be Vista performs worse on application speed for most applications I commomly use e.g. audio/ video transcoding, WinRAR, etc.etc. but that the Aero interface doesn't have any significant overhead.
Therefore if you want a marginally slower system that looks pretty go for a VistaMe upgrade at $$$ expense, or you can stick with a more stable, predictable and faster XP system at no extra charge.
Ho hum ... wonder which one I'll choose....

 

Hello,
I stopped reading after "No support for OpenGL."
Mrk

 

Without a doubt. Vista err Longhorn is "NOT" what was expected of from us Windows loyals unfortunately.

An old saying rings very true even in today's day and age, you MUST look back first before you can successfully proceed forward.

Microsoft subscribes to the false notion that once a task is complete, leave it behind and then totally forget it ever was.

Yep, i am a 98/Me loyal of many who are victims of that line of thinking so why would we expect Vista to be any different so far as some form of real improvement.

I'll likely suck up to getting a Vista disc in due time but i won't expect it to bring the house down by any stretch.

 

MS obviously wants people to have dualboot with Linux, which has an excellent opengl support.

 

Hello,
Well Tom, I didn't think about it that way. Good point.
Mrk

 

Indeed, but after the initial "wow" [sic] wears off, I bet the most time will be spent running Linux on such a system.

 

the vista wow had worn off after a few hours of testing it at college lol
lodore

 

From tomshardware.co.uk

 

Considering all this, I would say 2K and 2003 server were the best offering to come from MS till date.

 

I think it´s a bit shocking that Vista is often even slower than XP. On the other hand, with more powerful hardware (CPU, RAM, faster HDD) I´m sure that it will be faster than XP running on a less powerful system?

 

IMO Aero is poorly optimized. Sure, a 3D GUI doesn't need much optimization to run good, bt it impacts other applications. I heard that Aero was initially supposed to run on GeForce4 Ti cards or better. For some reason, early in the beta MS decided to not take that effort and made GeForce FX/Radeon 9500+ the minimum requirement. I guess they couldn't optimize it enough to make it run decently on GeForce4 Ti, even though games have had much better effects on lower-end hardware for a long while now.

 

Yesterday I went to set up and configure a new Dell laptop for a client which had Vista Home Basic installed on it. It was an Inspiron 1501 laptop which cost £350, with 500Mb RAM and an 80Gb HDD.

Last week I went to set up another identical laptop which was supplied with Windows XP Home preinstalled, otherwise exactly the same spec all-round.

Whereas the laptop with XP Home was quick and responsive out of the box, even before I had "Decrapified" it, the Vista one was glacial by comparison, to an unbelievable degree. After the initial start-up sequence where users and other things were set up, there was a wait of around 5 minutes while I was left looking at a nice graded blue screen with nothing on it, wondering what was happening. If the HDD light hadn't been flickering all the time, I'd have thought that the laptop had locked up, but eventually it did slowly crawl back to life as the start-up sequence carried on.

The "user experience" with the Vista laptop continued in this way even after the initial start-up sequence had finished. For example, I had to set up printing to a shared printer, so I went to the menu and clicked on "Control Panel". Then waited while a Control Panel window opened and a green progress bar slowly edged its way across the top of the window for a minute or two before the contents of Control Panel were shown. Opening it a second time took just as long, so it wasn't simply doing a first-time set-up of the applets that I could ascertain.

Maybe it was something to do with the 87 processes what were running on the unmodified out-of-the-box system that slowed it down so much. Although why Dell pre-install Google Desktop Search on a Vista laptop which purportedly has excellent built-in searching is anyone's guess.

I was extremely underwhelmed and this wasn't even a version of Vista which supports the Aero interface. Take one perfectly usable laptop running XP, upgrade the OS to Vista and then use the laptop as a paperweight as it's unfit for anything else.

The Wow Starts Now? All I can say is "The Yawn is Born".

How much will Microsoft refund if the user decides to upgrade back to XP Home, I wonder? Which will probably happen some time next week if I'm correct.

 

That kinda performance drop has gotta be down to a compatibility/system configuration issue, maybe a bad driver ?

 

I'll be going back to the client in about 10 days so I'll check the system over and look in the logs to see if anything untoward is recorded. I'll probably run through a few optimization measures to try and make it more usable and particularly to reduce the number of running processes at start-up. We shall see...