Here’s a bit of news interesting to those of us yoked to Microsoft operating systems. Windows XP has been demonstrated to be faster than Vista:
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.
I continue to be unenthusiastic about moving to Vista. I suppose I’ll be forced to eventually although I did manage to escape the execrable Windows Me.
Update
Ed Morrissey is having his own problems with Vista.
Same here. I’m happy with XP.
Poor, sad, benighted Windows users. We Macs feel your pain. And laugh at it.
Lol. I used to be one of the Mac faithful. One day I’d like to switch back.
That’s not unusual, though. Pretty much all operating systems get both larger and slower over time, because features are added, and those features take processing power. MacOS X was, in its early days, an exception (same with MacOS 7/8/9 as it converted from emulated 68k code to native PowerPC code). But 10.4 is notably slower than 10.3 on the same hardware, due to the way that Spotlight works and the demands it puts on the system. I suspect that Vista’s improvements, particularly in the graphics layer, and the overuse of flashy graphical tricks “because we can” (which MacOS X is also infected with) are to blame.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend Vista over XP at present, but once some of the more annoying bits are rounded off in SP1, it might be worth moving if you are using Windows anyway.