Windows XP outshines Vista

[Humpty]

Core 2 Duo, 2 gig ddr2.

 

Running both Vista Ultimate and XP Pro on their own HD's and both seem OK.

 

XP Pro gets into desktop quicker but with Vista the Superfetch feature causes a bit of lag after desktop comes up.

 

After Superfetch finishes what it has to do then it seems nearly, but not quite as responsive as XP.

New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1.

 

Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.

 

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.

 

Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

XP Outshines Vista

[JDPower]

The interesting part in that for me was this: "Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent."

That's the second (seperate) report I've read of a performance improvement in XP after SP3

[Caldor]

This is more FUD. The test, which is surely to go down in history as a farce, used different builds of office.

 

The real reason why XP performance is improving is that the tricks learnt under the new secure development lifecycle that MS initiated as part of its trustworthy computing initiative is being re-engineered into the XP kernel. Vista and Windows Server 2008 are the first OS's to go through this in MS's history. In XP though Memory management still lacks superfecth and the 64 bit support on the 64 bit version of XP is poor next to Vista 64 bit.

 

It is possible to create certain tests to grossly mislead how better Vista is over XP in 64 bit memory intensive tasks but that would be just spreading more fud with claims like "400% better performance in Vista over x64 XP!". Recently a Windows Server 2008 build did over 400% better than 2003 server under MS's "dogfood" testing of infrastructure which is one practical example of how the newer technologies work in certain situations.

 

Too many people still have the view that service packs are a significant thing. Windows update has changed the face of configuration management. Ive been on connect for sometime with SP1 and the only real thing I am interested in that isnt publicly available is the enhancements to bitlocker on other volumes.