Friday, November 23, 2007

Windows XP SP3 Yields Performance Gains

After a disappointing showing by Windows Vista SP1 (see previous post), we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (v.3244) delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS. Testing with OfficeBench showed an ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP w/Service Pack 2.

 image

Figure 1 - OfficeBench Completion Times
(In Seconds - Lower is Better)

Note: As with our Vista SP1 testing, we used the identical Dell XPS M1710 test bed with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM and discrete nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video.

Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release - unlike w/Vista SP1, Microsoft made no promises of improved performance for XP - the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus. In fact, XP SP3 is shaping-up to be a "must have" update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond's not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS.

Of course, none of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than 2x slower than the most current builds of its older sibling. Suffice to say that performance-minded users will likely choose to stick with the now even speedier Windows XP - at least until more "Windows 7" information becomes publicly available.

Windows Vista = Windows ME "Reloaded?" You be the judge!

197 comments:

Anonymous said...

PLEASE! take this down until you re-run it with XP OEM and XP SP1.
Wouldnt hurt to do it on 2000 SP4 also.

Anonymous said...

I don't see this at all with Vista, RTM was faster then XP (both SP2 & 3). SP1 for Vista runs alot better then RTM.

MedBer said...

I think that 10% of performance boost is due to the fixes they made in order to support Dual & Quad Core CPUs as it should be.

Anonymous said...

my Windows Vista RTM runs faster than XP on every scenery:
- startup is faster
- I'm ready to use Windows as the Vista desktop appears
- responsiveness is better
- multitasking, I/O and memomy managment is excellent
The real benchmark should be based on these: responsiveness, multitasking, memory managment, I/O managment!!!

biniar said...

Thanks for the insight!

Windows Vista equals Windows ME (reloaded) !

[E]

Anonymous said...

This is such FUD. I have no doubt that Vista is a little slower than XP, but this is ridiculous.

How about you rerun the benchmarks with Office 2003 on both Vista and XP. And the rerun them with Office 2007 on both Vista and XP.

Research Staff said...

Actually, we've run the same tests using Office 2003 on Vista SP1. The result? It went from being 2x slower than XP to 1.8x slower than XP. We've also tested with 2GB across the board and saw less than a 5% variance either way.

Of course, you don't need to take our word for it. All of our tools are publicly available through the exo.performance.network site. Simply register at www.xpnet.com, login to your private portal page and download DMS Clarity Studio.

RS

XP_2600 said...

I am working on IT field for about ten years now, i worked with Both of Windows and *NIX OSs and i am against OS wars generally, i just like to pick the best features from each OS and to be honest till now i think Windows XP is the ideal OS for all users, its stable enough, famous enough to find drivers and powerful enough to compete with newer OSs and with some third party apps you can keep it shine, Well for me Windows Vista is another Windows ME i am staying with XP, ;)

Unknown said...

Well I think if you have run the same tests how about you provide all the data to the public stating you added the 2 gig ram and that you leveled the playing field?

Anonymous said...

Regarding the request to re-run the test with XP OEM & XP SP1:

XP OEM (presumably with no service packs slipstreamed) and SP1 are unacceptable operating systems. The security and wireless capabilities -- among other things -- you lose by downgrading to pre-SP2 obviate any possible performance advantages... if they even exist.

XP SP2 is the production apex of Windows operating systems (leave OS X and ga-noo/Linux out of it, please!). Comparing SP3 only to SP2 is completely appropriate. Comparing SP3 to Vista merely compounds the embarassement. :-)

Thanks for the benchmarks, exo.blog!

Anonymous said...

Vista works better than XP on my PC.

All you are confirming is that your products runs slower on Vista.

I assume you are just a front for the FSF.

Anonymous said...

It'd be nice to have a reputable site run a standard benchmark to offer a comparison. The results in previous posts on this blog make it pretty clear the test methodology is flawed.

Anonymous said...

Anyone who claims that Vista boots faster than XP is a liar. There is not a single benchmark that has ever shown Vista to boot faster than XP. How gullible do you think we are, bearluke?

Anonymous said...

> Windows Vista equals Windows ME (reloaded) !

Sheesh, what an idiot....

Anonymous said...

Vista, Windows ME, or "Microsoft Bob".

Now there's a tough choice...

Unknown said...

Many will agree that 6.x are not nearly as nice to use as 5.x. [I am sure kernel could be much better but who cares when the environment that users see sucks.]

I played with 2008 server CTP. Many useful features. For example terminal services received application publishing and there a gateway and load balancing... Great!

However, administration is very different from 4.0 and 5.x. Annoying! The OS is also slower.
To me: give me a hypervisor (veridian or what-have-you) and the new TS features with 2003 server experience and I could not be happier. :)

Microsoft made such an effort in the past to keep software backwards compatible and now running IE in a shell is breaking everything.

I would say Redmond should drop most new features above kernel from 6.x and make 7.x based on 5 UI, except that by 2012 or whenever users and ISVs might finally adopt to Vista.

Anonymous said...

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/default.asp

Anonymous said...

Try disabling superfetch on Vista RTM and Vista SP1, even if you don't think it will make a difference.

You never know, superfetch could be doing more harm than good.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for taking the time to benchmark.

I'd love to see it compared to win2k sp4 also as I'm still running that :D

Can't find any motivation to "upgrade" to XP unless somehow xp.sp3 is finally faster than win2k.

Anonymous said...

Vista is twice slower because every click and key press must be reported to the MS :). Try to read the document that come on Vista install DVD to convince yourself.

J. McNair said...

Dear trolls:

He doesn't hate Vista. Recently, he DEFENDED Vista against claims that Aero Glass reduces notebook battery life (it doesn't unless you have REALLY BAD drivers).

He has merely confirmed what we already know. Windows Vista needs a couple of service packs to get to XP-SP2 levels of performance + security goodness. Yet, Microsoft is telling us to buy Vista NOW when everyone with sense knows better -- unless it comes pre-installed wait for the service packs.

This is how it goes with nearly EVERY MS operating system release since Windows NT 4.0 (which was poo until SP3).

I am not an MS hater, but I know that no OS maker ever gets it right the first time. EVER. However Windows XP eventually got it nearly right. So, I shall wait for MS to get Vista nearly right. Many of my Macintosh using friends are waiting for Apple to get Leopard right and my free software using friends generally avoid "x.00" releases of Linux distributions, *BSD or Solaris for the same reasons.

Anonymous said...

Actually, using the "power saver" profile, which disable transparent glass while on battery power - can provide a signficant battery life improvement.

That article, which was as much BS as this one, was about him claiming that battery life in Vista sucks no matter what you do... not that disabling "glass" is ineffective.

The testing methodology was also flawed. He disabled the DWM, which isn't what power-conscious users do. They disable transparency, not composition - and the Power Saver profile does this by default for a reason.

Unfortunately, the power saver settings aren't ideal when plugged in - so it's best to tweak that profile a bit if you're going to use it.

Anonymous said...

Yes, this is really very cool.

bizQuirk said...

We are going backwards in the Microsoft OS evolution. The company should have been on a path to refinement and performance, but in any ral world business sense at this office, I can say without hesitation that the Vista OS installed on our Lenovo laptops is an almost unusable situation.

I have wiped them off and installed XP, and am running Ubuntu on one, even though I am not such a Linux maven.

Without stability and drivers, there can be no talk of performance.

SO the cold say in hell has come where I, an XP power user, feel comfortable with a Mac Mini, and now, although gun shy of Linux, am ready to take the plunge - anything not to use Vista.

Greg said...

MS is far more concerned with collecting every dime they think they are owed than producing the best products.

1) Buy OS
2) After install register OS
3) Activate OS within spec time period or else get reduced functionality
4) Allow MS to load spyware onto OS (after registration and activation) to "validate it"

5) Pay MS or other vendor to fix security issues MS should have sorted out to begin with.

No wonder IT people are fed up with Redmond.

Anonymous said...

If Mac OS X would have been in the test, if would have made a straight line: Vista --> XP --> Mac

Anonymous said...

1Gb of RAM on XP is great, but not on Vista. Vista really needs 4x the recommended minimum.

Granted, I'm using Vista x64, but my system boots up at about 850MB with no apps loaded except AV. I've also got a lot of services turned off, such as Windows Search.

Also, everything runs a little heavier on Vista both in x86 and x64.

I've run Vista on a machine with 512MB and with 2048MB. Knowing what both ends of the curve feel like, and look like in taskmgr, any benchmark of Vista doesn't mean much with out at least 1.5 - 2GB of RAM.

Anonymous said...

Ouch. That doesn't look good for Vista. Though I'm actually half-way happy with Vista right now.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone realize that what slows down XPSP2 is installing the 1000+ patches released since 2004. This site should test XPSP2 without patches (obviously just for comparison) and XPSP2 with patches alongside XPSP3.

Anonymous said...

I think in machine code.

Research Staff said...

Actually, we *did* test XP SP2 w/o all of the patches. We used the updated XP w/SP2 CD image from MSDN as our installation source. This was a straight SP2 vs. SP3 comparison, with no intermediate patches applied to SP2.

RS

Henry Thoreau said...

I think the benchmarks are probably correct from use. While the author is open minded and accurate from what I can tell, I on the other hand, think MS is pure dog crap. Vista is everything that I switched to Linux for.

The OS is supposed to enable you to do things without exploding or rebooting right? How many Millions are made leeching off of MS's OS non-architecture? In any case, at home, I got my life back. I use windows xp/vista at work sometimes, and it ticks me off to no end. XP SP3 does boot up quite fast though. Not Linux pre-compiled kernel fast, but for windows it screams. But that doesn't mean it's not a joke for what it's supposed to do.

For windows systems, I will agree that Windows XP SP3 is the fastest for doing work and getting up and running. XP is simply something that MS hasn't broken for you yet. Don't kid yourself, or if you are a kid, then pay attention. Here is my prophecy. XP will be broken and you will be MADE to use Vista. That's a promise. Enjoy your temporary speed bump. When you see the blue screen after the latest patch in 2008 remember the idiot spouting off(me) on that blog site.

Anonymous said...

From my own experience, the benchmarks seem fairly accurate. I'm quite looking forward to SP3 now.

I'd love to know how the people reporting greater speed and responsiveness in Vista are running their tests. A fresh Vista install vs. the malware-ridden, three-year-old XP installation they were using previously?

Anonymous said...

I wonder how relevant it is that the hardware used is more recents than SP2.
SP2 could have improvements/enhancement by Intel and nVidia for that particular hardware setup that were not included in SP2.

Anonymous said...

To all those people calling this speed comparison BS: Please make the test yourself and prove Vista is faster, thank you very much.

Anonymous said...

well, I,m a gamer and riscing beeing the laughing stock here; According to my own private HL2 test, Vista sucks

Anonymous said...

"If Mac OS X would have been in the test, if would have made a straight line: Vista --> XP --> Mac"

Are you saying Office on the Mac is faster than on XP? I'm a Mac user (although until recently I've been using versions of Windows since 3.1) and I'm always pleased to see MS bashing, but only if it's based in some kind of reality.

Office 2008 isn't out for OS X yet, and Office 2004 isn't a Universal app so runs in emulation on newer Macs. Office on the Mac is fast enough but it is noticeably slower than on the two year old Dell I have from work (everything else is dog slow on the Dell, but that's because I can't be bothered maintaining something I barely use.)

Anonymous said...

Yep bearluke. Vista's I/O is greatest :-D

http://www.tech-hounds.com/
article29/ArticlesPage1.html

(warning. eof in the middle of the link)

Unknown said...

Excellent. Its nice to see good things coming from Redmond. They're track record hasn't been that grand lately.

Anonymous said...

Vista and ME are uncomparable.

A lot of people have been saying that Vista is the new ME since it came out, but those people probably never ran ME, or just don't know what ME actually was.

ME was a release of Windows 98 that tried to incorporate usablility advances made in Windows 2000. It was written during the tail end of the Windows 2000 development cycle, and had little support.

AS much or mode of the Windows base code was rewritten in Windows Vista as in Windows 2000. It is not an upgrade, or downgrade, of Xp as ME was of WIndows 98, it is a totally new OS.
Me was totally unusable due to it's instability, where as Vista is as stable or more than XP. I've been using Vista for about a year now and I have never seen a BSOD. I'm a developer so the system isn't used mildly. There were bugs on RTM, but nothing like ME or even OS X 10.5, which is just an incremental OS X update, not a total reworking of the Mac OS.

The biggest problem with Vista is compatability with older software and drivers. This is due to Vista's code and design being much different than XP, and backwards compatability is often an area of bloat and insecurity in an OS. Much of the compatability issues have been fixed since release however, and everything except some pretty old hardware is compatable.

Windows Vista is not the new ME, it is the new XP. No one liked XP when it first came out. There were compatability issues and bugs. Most of the people who didn't like XP at the time though hadn't actually used it, as is the case now with Vista.

After using XP since beta 3, I couldn't go back to it after using Vista. Vista isn't the new ME, XP is the new Windows 98.

Anonymous said...

Excellent fud. It is no secret 1GB is too little for vista to run well, but XP can run pretty well on 1GB.
You only managed to show that swapping kills performance. but failed to see it.

Anonymous said...

hell yeah test it with win2k sp4 also

Anonymous said...

Vista with only 1 GB of RAM is terrible - (use XP with 128MB and you will see a similarity) this article is HEAVILY slanted against Vista (for whatever reason) - Vista works very well - very well with games also - you just need RAM (3+GB). 1GB is WAY TO LITTLE!!!

note: I have used Vista for many months and would not go back to XP by choice... but I also have RAM in my machine (and it is within 2 years of age)

Unknown said...

YES xp is faster and more stable then vista but i think that XP will work maybe 1-2 year more then vista will be better like comparing SKODA= XP WITH BMW= VISTA ehhehehe have a nice day BULLEN ROCKS

Anonymous said...

Vista performances sucks a lot... I tried it just 1 day than I erased it.

I still remain with XP until Haiku and/or ReactOS succeed !!!

www.reactos.org:

Unknown said...

Well one has to be honest.
Yes vista may be slower than XP with similar hardware configuration but wouldn't NT4 be faster than XP ? - because as such the OS were built on foundation of available hardware of the time.
Comparing Vista to ME is not the proper approach. Vista is not perfect - so was XP when it went out. Vista is bringing new features that was on request of the community - do you want it or not?

Anonymous said...

Oh my i didn`t see so much defenders of Vista on one place in my life :D Microsoft probably get the best commercials for brainwashing.
Ok let`s hit the hot news.My comment "Bravo" for the MS team that is about to release the SP3 for XP.Let`s get back with 10 years and start with Windows 98.It was fast OS very unstable but very fast , very unsecure but fast , next step 98SE same shit i didn`t feel any difference.Next Step Windows ME and Windows 2000 (2k , NT5 call it how you like) Windows Me was little more slower than 98 but in times more unstable if you ask me , Windows 2000 the first realease was very slow and got many problems with the drivers but when you managed to configure it it is paying you back.It was very stable OS (talking about MS OS`s).With the next Service Packs the 2k become realy fast and stable but still Win98 was at least 2 times faster (and 10 times unstable).Coming Up Windows XP ahh yeah i remember when i saw this colorfull themes they stamped in my mind to the moment whe i`ve started benchamrking and do some job.I hopped that XP will be just 2K with just new interface but it wasn`t XP for me personaly sucked , and in 2003 God sayed Let there be light , And there was a light , Windows 2003.Windows 2003 was presented as server OS but after loosing alot of nerves of activating and installing all needed stuff and all corect drivers it was about 10-20% even 30% more faster than XP sp1(and i`m talking and about games not only software because i`ve readed enough stupid coments in the net that the games are performing realy slow , that was`nt true).When MS released the SP2 for XP and SP1 for 2003 the difference remain almost the same.In the mean time i`ve touched with the first alpha versions of Longhorn there was no very big difference between first alphas and XP i even feel that the first alpha version that was in the web was more faster than XP.But with the latest Alpha`s everything changed they become more slower and more slower and more full with bugs until the beta where i`was amased it was more slower than the alpha versions i hopped that microsoft will be able to repair this.Until the RC version i was tottaly disapointed from MS it was and the Final version is still more than 2 time slower than XP SP2 in big part of the tasks.Someone Sayed that Vista is loading faster on boot ok possible.Windows 98 will load 2 times slower from Vista if the computer is connected to LAN but it will be 10 times faster and more than 20 times less hardware consumption.I don`t care that the OS will load for 20sec or will load for a minute.But i care when the OS start scraching on my HDD and all the RAM is full,with what ?! no body knows. I`m shure that MS are not shure what exactly Vista is doing to consume so much RAM and CPU time in idlle.For the moment for the best choice between performance,security and stability is Windows 2003 SP2.The performer is well known that is the old buggy Win 98 it is very hard to find drivers for it but still it is possible to be used.If you want more user frendly os and good performer i think we all know XP.If you like crystal interfaces cool animations use Vista but the price is too high to much performanse for nothing.Win XP , Win 2003 and Win 2K will be still used in the next 6-7 years more than Vista.I don`t know what is going on with Win 2008 i`ve lost interest of the Longhorn Platform and i`dont have hope that it will perform fast soon.I will wate for the next Gen MS OS.

Anonymous said...

To be quite fair who gives a flying toss that office 2003 runs 10% faster on SP3...

For a start its an office suite and hardly system intensive.

Secondly if your gonna benchmark the latest SPs at least use the latest office 2007.

Thirdly all these bandwagonners saying ZOMG VISTA SUCKS... This benchmark proves absolutely jack for gamers/users of photoshop and other applications that arent office based.

Anonymous said...

All the independant game sites show Vista is slower than XP.

I've seen it first hand. Vista was not just slower than XP but also jerked unevenly on the same machine for playing DoD:Source, HL2:DM and CS:Source.

Unknown said...

Please test windows XP with dx10 functions while ur at it.

Cant do that?
Oh, to old system?

I use my computer to play games and surfing.
I also sused both OS and I guess for me Vista is both nicer, visually more appealing and faster than the machine I had using with win XP.
Its subjectivly faster which i care about, not the e-penis world record testing with syntetic or similiar benchmarks.

I can bench my card really high overclocking in 3dmark06, when I play my games with the same settings it crashes due to more load from not optimizing for the games but an old benchmark as 3dmark is a lying and missleading benchmark today.

Win xp has a best before used date, I guess I stick with Vista ;)

Anonymous said...

The real benchmarks should be done using games, first person shooter games. Noone's interested how fast office starts, seriously the people who use office are "office people" who have no interest in such geeky matters, do you think they go home and tell their partner "office" ran 10% better today, please. They just turn on their pc at work, type a few letters and what not and play a basic windows card game.

Anonymous said...

I dual boot Vista and XP SP2 on my system. X2 5400 4 GB DDR2 Geforce 8600 512 mb video (dx10 on vista 9 on xp) I have found that vista boot time is much less than XP. Office 2007 runs fast on both. The difference I see is in gaming. COD2 runs great on both vista taking a bit of an edge, but WOW runs way better on XP. Vista is very choppy where XP runs smooth as can be.

notanymore said...

Everything I have ever tried video editing wise on Vista has made me cry. I might well be willing to try it again, but until someone can show me that my personal editing software choices are faster on Vista, I'll give it until at least SP2 comes out.

Unknown said...

It boggles my mind to say Vista is running slow. For me it's faster than XP on everything. WoW runs a bit faster. CoD4 is smooth. All of my apps launch quickly. Just yesterday I created a DVD and it encoded quickly.I haven't encountered a single bug. It's fast and stable.

I do have a high end system though. C2D e6600, 4gb PC6400 Corsair XMS, DFI Infinity 975x, ATI Radeon x1900xtx

It's important to note that Vista is a self tuning OS and does get faster over time. Superfetch learns your computer habits and caches programs and games to ram, which is why you are seeing a higher ram usage. This is a good thing. And when an app launches the OS releases the ram to it.
There are also several updates for vista that aren't on windows update. Extremetech did an article entitled "4 must have vista updates" that has the link to them. They do make a difference.

Anonymous said...

Buuhuu! I already upgraded to vista and its slower... Well your loss why did you buy OS that's still in beta stage.

DX10? ... Rofl!

btw I changed from 2k to XP in 2005-2006. why? 2k was better and all my games run on it too.

Anonymous said...

Vista is definitely not worth its price if you'd ask me. Don't need this test to get that idea, using it for two days already got me convinced. Sad excuse for an OS.

Anonymous said...

I think that vista is the best OS yet. Personaly I am willing to work on a slower computer to get vistas new features. Either way, my laptop with vista runs faster and better than my computer with XP. It depends a lot on your configuration. FOr example, if you run the transparent windows (aero) then it runs slower, but that is easaly turned off and it improves your performence a lot.

Anonymous said...

so. hows vista for actual intense processes? who cares how it performs with games, thats what you have consoles for. how does it perform for say, video editing, programming/modeling, or if used as a DAW? (provided you do have the right drivers)

Anonymous said...

Haha... tested with 1gb of ram. GJ!

Research Staff said...

You folks who ware requesting all of these follow-on test scenarios are missing the point: We created the exo.performance.network (www.xpnet.com) so that *anyone* can do their own testing and system monitoring. In fact, the more systems you test/monitor, the larger the exo.repository data set becomes, yielding even more authoritative conclusions.

Come on, guys, sign-up today and help us build this thing!

RS

Bualdoot said...

Author "Bualdoot"

For thoes who said Vista is faster and better, and for who ever said the following statement, Your WRONG!
"Windows Vista is not the new ME, it is the new XP. No one liked XP when it first came out. There were compatability issues and bugs. Most of the people who didn't like XP at the time though hadn't actually used it, as is the case now with Vista.

After using XP since beta 3, I couldn't go back to it after using Vista. Vista isn't the new ME, XP is the new Windows 98."

I personally loved the first realease of XP Pro, upgrading from 98. It was alot less buggy for me.

Take a look at the requirments for ANY ANY ANY game. The requirements for Vista are ALWAYS higher than XP, normally twice that of XP's requirements.

So there you have it. Every single dang game developer agrees that Vista is more system intensive...and there for slower. I have personally used Vista, and yeah, sure I agree it has some cool new features and may seem to run pretty smoothly and not many bugs at first. But, any game ran on it is choppy, unless you go play Starcraft: BW (which is awesome no matter how many times you play it!!).
Comparing a new computer you bought with Vista on it to a computer you had XP on, isn't a fair comparison. The new PC has a newer CPU, either 64bit, Dual core, or both, and since it has Vista on it from the factory they said hey, gotta put more RAM in it or its gonna fall flat on its face. So of course it runs better than the old system. Now put XP on the new system and XP is once again faster.
And to those of you still running Pre- XP operating systems......UPGRADE TO XP ALREADY YOU MORONS! Unless you are running 98 in order to play Red Alert.

Anonymous said...

For those who said they want to see reputable sites. How about CNET news, which did one? There was also a couple from the more reputable magazines(things like maximum pc, as I recall). Their results had a little variance, but it was minor. for the most part they were homogenous.

Anonymous said...

I believe the initial response was of "anonymous MS" employees who were told to post comments backlashing the hack and slash of vista.
I believe vista requires 3X the power in random access memory to run 'usable'
I believe MS has much too much control over the end user via vista and will never allow MS to exercise the control they so desire over me.

I will use XP till they decide to change their protocol.

Unknown said...

I believe you are paranoid.

Anonymous said...

Currently using XP SP2 will be getting SP3

I've booted Vista 32bit on my system and played few games + image edit. I must say I don't notice much difference in anything I do except in older games like Guild Wars, the frame rates get a bit choppy, must be the dx10 :\ these older apps weren't designed for dx10.

Research Staff said...

jason,

But that doesn't mean they're not out to get him! Or you! Or me! (:gasp!)

:-)

RS

Firehorsepower said...

Personally, I would like Microsoft to release a new OS that appears like Windows 2000 Professional, but has the Windows Server 2008 back-bone.
I.e. Vista without the nagging and shiny stuff nobody really needs.

I still pick the 2000 interface over that candy-store thick blue child-GUI that is XP. If you *really* want to get work done on a PC, you'll go with the classic look, maybe with the black vista theme, but not the 3D and UAC. It might be safe for some, but there is a large audience that prefers the 1 user has all the rights OS.

Anonymous said...

I don't understand the people who say it's unfair to benchmark Vista on a system with twice the RAM that Microsoft says Vista needs.

Anonymous said...

I think I am missing something. 6 months ago I had a reply from M% that Vista Ultimate in 32 or 64 guise, would play best with at least 2 GB RAM and preferably 4 GB

Am I incorrect?

Anonymous said...

I think it's important to realize what has happened with almost every OS released by MS. It shoots out of the gate slow...and after a couple SPs people are praising it. In a year and a half or so, people will be using a workable, slick Vista and looking back at XP. Currently, however, it's a mixed basket between XP and Vista. Those with better performance on Vista are usually those with the either new or good high-end systems. Have fun "debating." :)

Anonymous said...

Im sorry im gonna have to agree with the post at the top of the page. Vista should not have been released so early.

its a total dissapointment.

a good few business are reverting back to xp cos of incomaptabilty issues and as for bug fixes vista has had more fixes than i have had hot dinners.

vista = windows me (all over again) roll on windows 7

untill then i will give up windows xp and dont seem the need to get vista

phil croxford

Anonymous said...

Well, im usin both Xp n Vista,
Xp is always the best compared to vista in performance vise, but graphically Vista has a better presentation and eye catching stuff...

I have a own customize PC, which runs
Core 2 Extreme 2.4GHz, 4 GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce 7950 SLI, n other stuff...

I try both OS in this PC,
Vista was not bad, its startup was obviously a bit slower, but then the aplication still runs great.
then i tried the Xp, n it was really fast!

But Xp has some weakness, if u want to create a Wireless Network, u need to go through all kinds of settings n transfer using USB Pendrive or floppy... but Vista has cool feature to directly create a Wireless Network in just a minute..

Coz, me n my friends love to play LAN games, and we like the easy setup connection of the Vista Wireless Network creation,
So, Xp is not the Best, but is still the Best curently depending on the user choice...

For performance I'm goin for Xp, but for Cool features, I'm goin for Vista...

So, hope Bill Gates n his cooperation will come out with some new OS that combines both the Vista n Xp capabilities to form a High End OS...

thats all...

:)

Anonymous said...

and for others softwares than microsoft ? comparison is done on
only one software grin !

Anonymous said...

Sorry guys but Vista is pretty and slow - there are no two ways about it.

Yes Vista is stable - I have had no crashes due to driver conflicts but have had multiple shut-downs on some services like schost.exe caused by driver conflicts/or software conflicts, no different to XP.

However XP now is also very stable, I can't recall the last time I had a BSOD - I think it was when I forgot to turn off my antivirus when updating my Nvidia card drivers.

I also run Linux Mint 4 which I have also found to be very stable, so from a stability standpoint I think they are all very good.

But the fact remains Vista is slower then XP, and no one regardless of whatever benchmark they use can deny this. Vista needs 2gig to run correctly, XP will run on 512meg just fine - hell it used to run on my old laptop with 256meg & a 1.2gig CPU just fine, I'm 100% sure Vista would not even install on that system!!!!

Also the whole DX10 argument is a moot point at the moment, few games actually support it - and you also need a new gen video card which I suspect few people except gamers have lashed out for.

Anonymous said...

I have applied SP3 aswell. I can't say if my win is faster, cause I just installed it as separate windows from previous and it's fast anyway.
I guess SP 3 might be even better when it's full release and integrated to OS. So I would install xp with SP 3 already added.

Anonymous said...

could u test the differences between sp2 and sp3 on a n older system? for example amd athlon xp 1800+ or such...

does it support default powernow and such for power saving? what about features in general...

oh btw.. windows is good for games, it has directx... as for everything else, linux is superior in every single possible way.

here's one tiny example of why... 3 million zombie bot computers infected with a single trojan, sending spam to your inbox everyday and drugging the internet. all of them have windows. poised to destroy the internet in 2011. THANKS M$!

Anonymous said...

I'm getting the feeling that some people here are paid by microsoft (or work there) to say that vista works better then xp..

Everyone know's it aint true...

Unknown said...

For those who claim that a 10% increase in the speed Microsoft Office runs is inconsequential... you obviously haven't been looking at this from a business standpoint.

I work in the IT department of a medium sized business. If we get a 10% increase in the speed Office runs, that will likely save each of our office workers a good 15 minutes a day of work. Assuming we have 30 office workers, that's 450 minutes, or almost 8 hours a day. That 10% increase in the speed of Microsoft Office effectively gives us another employee.

That's inconsequential?

We've reviewed Vista vs. XP. Our conclusion - yes, Vista can run fine, if we want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading every computer in our network to a top of the line machine. And in the end, our employees will do the same work on prettier desktops and not save any time. And yes, those same upgraded machines would run XP even faster than they run Vista.

Yes, Vista will eventually be better for gaming, not because of it's inherent qualities, but because things such as DirectX 10 will force you to use Vista by not releasing XP versions. But I think we'll update to Vista when enough of our computers die or become obsolete enough that they are replaced by machines that run it well. That won't be any time soon.

Anonymous said...

man, this is not the big thing. 10% of performance boost are little compared to hardware-borne enhancements over the last few years.
I tell you what: the 10% performance increase will be annihilated within six or seven OS patches (1-2 month).
And I suppose that the perfomance increase by 10% was possible by fixing performance brakes brought with previous bad quality patches. Yeah what a surprise! Make something bad and offer improvements afterwards. Hell, this sucks!

Simply it bores me!

Microsoft long were sucessful due to good market knowlwdge. Nowadays they seem to miss the opportunities. Maybe they became dull over the years...

...10% pfff!

Anonymous said...

I hate that Vista requires 3+ B ram just to open notepad. I tried it out in a store demonstration while shopping for a new pc. I am telling you that thing was dogged out and slow as grandma in a checkout line.

Anonymous said...

holy crap lets compare apples to apples and make it a true fair comparison, put 2 or 3 GB of RAM in the test PC and then see the benchmarks.
Vista gets a heartbeat on 1GB but 2GB is the true minimum.

EVERYONE doing test benchmarks keeps doing this, RAM IS CHEAP!!
I can buy 1GB of DDR2 RAM for $30 and a 2GB piece for $68.

YOur tests just piss me off and once again try to bash Vista more. I have ran it since release and had 0 problems.

Anonymous said...

I think there are some misunderstandings about this situation. Since the release of Windows 95, the new operating systems have always improved performance out of the box; as it should be. The operating system is supposed to expose the hardware to the applications in an easy, efficient, secure and controlled way so that they get the most out of it; With Vista, for the first time this is not the case. Except for windows dressing and some badly and user unfriendly implemented security improvements, Vista will in broad terms decrease your performance significantly on any given hardware. Why anyone would choose to suffer this consequence voluntarily is beyond my comprehension. Anyone thinking that this problem will disappear over time with service packs is in for an unpleasant surprise. In my opinion, M$ has completely misfired on this particular development project, the people in charge of defining the scope were completely out of touch with the future users, especially the business users, who basically gets the absolute opposite of what they would like in this release. I suspect that the "technical" people at M$ went unchecked and got to develop the operating system they would like to play with, instead of producing the operating system based on the needs of the actual users out there. At the same time, M$ had a mishap during development that made it necessary to scrap the development work midway, because of escalating complexity that made it impossible to build the pieces together. All of these things has led to a "pretty looking" inefficient resource hog, packed with compromises and half measures and forced through a time frame compacted by the failed development effort. Vista will never progress into a swan from the ugly duckling it is now, but hopefully M$ has learned enough (or been re-reminded, because I believe they knew all this once up on a time in Redmond), so that the next Windows (Windows 7) will be an efficient little compact thing that will run circles around any of their previous versions: The way it should always be. M$ has in one quick scoop, absorbed all the hardware improvements that other companies have spend the last many years providing us with, this is a sin, just like Intel, AMD, ATI, Nvidia and so many other technology companies work hard everyday to improve the performance of their products, SO SHOULD M$. Instead they reap all these performance gains and set us right back where we were. Sure their product looks alot better, but others have paid the price for it, and that’s just plain unfair!

Anonymous said...

In my opinion, vista is not that worse but u need to have the perfect hardwares for it at least 2 Gb RAM, 3-series intel chipset Mobo and essentially a dedicated 128 MB graphic card: Vista then is as fast as XP But XP (sp2 or 3) i must say is very much a reliable OS with all drivers and compatible softwares, most widely used with minimum hardware requirement.GEEKS jump to the next levelt with vista update some hardwares and ventures into vista as much as u did with XP you will be more than satisfied.

Anonymous said...

Windows 95 is faster than Windows XP... Let's all go back to Windows 95 if speed is all we care about.

-_-

Anonymous said...

It might be more informative if some quad core cpu's with 4gb ram were used to measure performance.

As with my specs I obviously outperform those SP3 results using Vista.

Anonymous said...

My general testing also seems to confirm that SP3 is quicker than SP2, maybe on par with SP1. I'm going to do some benchmarks to see for sure though.

Anonymous said...

hey guys for you people wanting vista well here is some news vista is slower than xp and eats up disk space for people who upgrade their pcs
vista eats up like 15-17 Gbs of memory while xp only eats up about 2-5
i have a 4.5 Ghz AMD processor with 8 gbs of ram and a 40 gb drive vista eats half the hardrive and xp starts up within 10 secs for me
vista: about a min guys choose for yourslef is vista or xp better

Anonymous said...

"i have a 4.5 Ghz AMD processor with 8 gbs of ram and a 40 gb drive"

40? Forty gig?! 4.5ghz processor and ONLY 40 gig? UR takin the pish dude!

BTW I don't like Vista either.

Anonymous said...

@ anonymous above you gatta be shittin me you have 8gig of ram and a 4.5Ghz cpu coupled with a lousy 40gig Hdd (wait dont tell me its UDMA33 aswell) your an idiot, loose the 40gig and replace it with a speedier 250/320gig sataII Hdd and you'll proly see a huge differance in performance

Anonymous said...

Here, Vista x64 RTM completes Officebench benchmark in 31 seconds.

Q6600, 4GB RAM, X1950XTX GPU, GB-965-DQ6 mobo.

Let's see some XP benchmarks on similiar hardware :)

Anonymous said...

I can remember when people whined about winXP slowing their systems and gaming with "unnecessary" gui improvement "bells and whistles". Hardware scales up far beyond what people are running at the OS release in no time. Running XP on todays hardware is nothing like the hardware most people were using when xp was released. Also, don't forget that a lot of people have probably upgraded two or three times by the time the successive service packs came out.
So xp can run a little faster on todays hardware. So win98 prob much faster. How about win 3.11 and DOS? It probably screams.

Anonymous said...

God some of you are idiots. Anyway, what is this choppyness of games? I run Vista Ultimate 64bit with 4gb of memory, 4400x2 @ 2.7ghz, 8800gt, 2x200gb in stripe and this machine is never slow.

I run the latest games as well, so don't pull that crap.

I ran the same setup on xp 64bit and vista 64bit shits on xp 64bit. Simple as that. Benchmark the 64bit oses.

Anonymous said...

btw, test completed in 58 seconds on my setup.

Anonymous said...

I've made my tests, and Vista with 4 GB of memory dont even get close to the gaming perfomance of XP with 1 GB!!!

All of you that come here to write lies should be shame: everyone see's that you dont know what your talking about.

You should form the club of the 'hardware ungry people', a club for those rich bastards that think normal and natural that a new OS demands more and more ressources, more than de double of its predecessor.

I bet this club could also call himself the 'online gaming zombies', because for shure your taking a hell of a beating on online gaming! hehehehe

Anonymous said...

all we need is a OS that not is bloated xp is ok it's like acar only we need is fine and running one we dn't need a car with lots of light bells to ring vista is a bloated os xp is a fine one

Unknown said...

Vista is a self tuning OS. Superfetch needs time to learn your computing habits. The more you use it the faster it gets.
You also need good drivers. Nvidia has pretty crappy ones out for both thier motherboard chipsets and their video cards.
I have an Intel chipset and ATI video card and my gaming performance in Vista is no worse than XP. In some cases it's even better. A recent Maximum PC review confirmed this.

Anonymous said...

Vista with 2/4 or 8GB RAM combined with a dual/quad core CPU is within 4% of Windows XP in modern games. To say otherwise is a downright XP-fanboyistic lie.

Anonymous said...

First none of these so called self benchmarks mean a thing! You just cant benchmark one app or one game etc...you need to run a suite of benchmarks to get even remotely meaningful results. Indutry wide on identical hardware XP benches faster than VISTA!!! Period!

Im so sick of ppl posting half-baked comments with an obviously lack of any provable results.

The people that benchmark systems and OS's all agree on ONE fact XP is faster across the board.

Microsofts view of the world is that it is one big office network.....well MS it isnt.

Entire governments are reverting back to XP, hell even the Olympic committee tossed Vista.

What does it take for ppl to realize and except the truth???

Microsoft has continually released OS's in this fashion:

A slapped together "bottomline OS, then a real working stable OS..

Guess where Vista falls in that lineup:/

Further rumor has it that the upcoming Windows 7 will be the next DECENT OS, however MS is already talking about a annual subscription service for the up and coming OS's.

Boil this all together and a few obvious facts emerge.

MS wants to control Internet comms-totally, they want complete unrestricted access to YOUR computers, they care not one whit about YOU, the DO care about their bottomline, they lie , cheat, and have even been caught editing wiki posts with falsehoods.

You want serious, truthful benchmarks and reporting Tom's Hardware guide is the ONLY place Ive found since windows 3.1 that has ANY idea of how to properly benchmark OS's and systems.

Personally I'm sticking with XP SP2 until they pry it from my cold dead hands. There was NEVER a need for VISTA in the first place.

SP3 from all Ive read is nothing more than MS's latest scam to install past updates that at least knowledgable people had widely avoided. Sure they throw in a bone or two to fool the masses.

My advice: read EVERY damn word , no matter how deep it is buried on MS's site about EVERY patch you install on XP from here out.

MS is going to patch XP to an unusable state to force Vista sales.

This methodology is already obvious in the way they rolled out Vista: aka kick backs from chain comp stores for forcing Vista on their customers.

If Vista WAS all that, which it definitly isnt...this ploy would have not been necessary.

Ask yourself, why not port DX10 to XP....answer same reason....MS wants users to buy Vista...they need MORE yachts or w/e!!

I pity the fools who believe anything MS says nowadays.....sure Vista is pretty...but in order to make it 1/4th as fast or stable as XP you have to disable every "improvement" Vista was supposed to provide.

XP is NOT unsecure....it never was...users are at fault here not the OS.

Sure you have to stop for a minute and read a paragragh or two to secure any OS. But that doesnt mean that VISTA does it for you.

I surf all the BAD sites....in 5 years with XP I caught ONE virus which Norton corp 9, killed so fast that I cudnt even read the popup lol.

I game also...and as anyone knows...games are where hackers abound...to them its almost a game itself. If you've goten infected its YOUR fault not XP's!

EVERY REPUTABLE BENCHMARKING ORGANIZATION SEZ: XP whomps VISTA!

Wake up and smell the coffee folks....

Anonymous said...

I just recently returned to XP after running Vista for about 6 months or so (have had them dual booting the entire time, but never went back to XP because I was mostly using Vista for MCE). The improvement in performance and responsiveness in XP is huge. This is on a dual core machine as well. Anybody that can say Vista is more responsive is an idiot, plain and simple. Take folder browsing for example - horrendous in Vista, even if you disable thumbnail views, etc. Photoshop CS3, which is something I use on a daily basis, runs WAY, WAY, WAY better in XP, most notably the startup time. Those benchmarks pretty much agree with everything i've seen so far.

Anonymous said...

Worst test scenario I have ever seen setup. These guys want to be taken for real. Could your Mickey Mouse group not afford another gig of RAM to run your tests. This reminds me of the days when people were complaining the WIN98 ran faster of 512MB than XP.

If you want to be taken seriously(which I doubt) rerun your tests with a rig running at minimum 2gig.
Or run a test with a machine that has a whopping 512MB and see who runs some old apps faster WIN98 or XP. May I suggest maybe a older Madden, watch XP crawl.

Hell the last time I ran 1gig on a machine it was indeed running WIN98

Anonymous said...

ermm, your testing vista with only 1Gb of ram. Everyone knows vista doesn't work on less than 2Gb of ram. Anyhow, vista is faster than xp (I have a dual boot), better looking , more stable and has DX10(.1). Quad core on xp was crap, at least vista properly supports it.

Anonymous said...

http://tinyurl.com/35d6nh

Vista gaming is on par with XP. I can't notice 4% difference in games sorry. With modern hardware, Vista is a great OS. With low end / medium hardware, Vista will seem slow - and your best remaining with the aged XP for your antiquated hardware.

Anonymous said...

Nobody seems to have mentioned that unpatched XPSP2 was not (properly) designed for use on multicore processors - see KB896256. Benchmarking without this patch may be suspect. This may go some way to explaining the apparent difference between SP2 and SP3.

Each new version of windows has used more resources (processor, disk, memory) than the previous one and each has taken time to get an equivalent level of stability, driver support, etc.

Over time, hardware performance improves and relative costs go down. Also, after a while software vendors no longer write for / support older hardware or OS.

So it just boils down to the timing of when to make the change.
For most people, it is best to stay with their current OS and let the early adopters shake out the bugs and compatibility issues. Why contribute to M$ revenues if you don't need to ???

Anonymous said...

XP sp 3 crashes IE 3 out of 5 times you try to get online. I'll stick with sp 2 for now.

Anonymous said...

XP SP3 RC provides for an entertaining BSOD upon connecting a 512MB USB storage on this PC...

My advice - follow Microsofts own advice -->
Technet 'Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission critical systems. Microsoft recommends that you have a backup of your data prior to installing any pre-release software'

Anonymous said...

I am running a HP Pavilion A1520 N computer with 3Gigs of RAM an AVI
X 1300 graphics card and XP MCE 2005 with SP2 installed.
Last week I downloaded XP SP3 from Microsoft's site and installed it.
When I rebooted my computer it kept recycling from the boot up screen(
info about drives,shadowed RAM etc), then the XP boot up screen and
finally back to the boot up info screen( over and over)
I was able to get into the safe mode and try to recover from a restore
point, but it was not able to restore the computer to a the Pre SP3
install.
I used ADD/REMOVE program and uninstalled SP3, but the problem still
existed. Not able to get Windows to boot normally
The only way was able to get things back to normal was to reinstall
the OS from my recovery partition.
I tried to install SP 3 again with a fresh install of the OS and the
same thing happened.
Any ideas as to what might be going on? I did not have this problem
when I re- installed SP2 this AM from another fresh install of the
OS.
It seems that MS has not got all the bugs out.

Anonymous said...

I had a similar situation with an HP Pavilion running MCE2005, however, I was able to boot into Safe Mode, check Event Manager, and found winlogon.exe was having trouble and constantly rebooted. My solution? Uninstalled SP3 in Safe Mode and have not had a problem since.

I also tried SP3 RC on another HP running XP Home - to date - its not had any issues *cross fingers*

Its a Release Candidate - its not official, hell its not even final by Microsoft's standards - so don't start bashing till they say 'here it is' (meaning its finalized)

Unknown said...

Microsoft is not as interested in winning the hearts and minds of the home user as they are the corporate user. Right now, the sales job MS has to do to convince corporate IT departments that Vista as the successor to XP is worth the implicit hardware upgrades is a *much* harder task than was selling XP as the successor to NT 4.

These benchmarks are just making that value proposition that much harder - that the expected delta in productivity is so small that the expected deployment costs just aren't worth it. Our own IT group has postponed Vista deployment until sometime in mid to late 2009 at the earliest.

When measurable, provable things like network file transfer times and HD transfer rates show regressive performance traits, that doesn't give anyone in the IT world a *real* reason to get that warm fuzzy to push Vista out. You can't make those decisions on one or two gamers saying "gee, I think Vista starts faster" or "its more responsive."

Vista isn't bad, but it isn't breathtaking, either. I find it to have a ludicrous installation footprint, and its GUI extensions over XP to be superficial at best. Yeah, the scrolling rolodex of active windows is a cool thing to do once or twice, but after that, who cares?

I can't help but wonder just how much pepper my new 7500-based lappy with 3GB RAM would be running XP instead of Vista...and in what I would call the worst indictment of Vista's (lack of) relevance, I can't think of *one* compelling thing I would knowingly miss were I to blow it away tomorrow and replace it with XP. After all the time and effort that's gone into Vista, that's a pretty disappointing reality.

Anonymous said...

i'm running vista on 768 ram and a riva 128 pci 4 meg card.
Yes, I don't get aero.
Otherwise it's fantastic.

other points of interest.
ubuntu 7.10 - would not boot to gui.
Mepis -latest - got to desktop

Summary:
Linux still sux for the desktop.
If I want a nix desktop I have osx.

Anonymous said...

I haven't got DRM with my XP Pro.

And XP Pro SP2 is way faster than Vista on my Lenovo T7700 intel dual core 2, 4Gb Ram, nVidia Quadro FX 570M.

ATI video card is out of question. I know my nVidia will work great on XP and on Linux, I get more value for money. ATI is kind of at their good will.

FartyAnimal said...

There are rumors on the net that Windows 2003 outperforms Windows XP... since no one has really made a benchmark of the two (or I just couldn't find one) would it be possible if you did one... a Vista, Windows 2003, Windows XP performance comparison... Thanks

Anonymous said...

I think Windows Vista 32/64bit loads much faster than Windows XP SP2 and Windows XP SP3. Windows XP is stable, but runs at a moderate speed. Windows Vista runs about 2x faster. It took me 28 seconds to load Vista and took me about 58 seconds to load Windows XP. With the SP1 coming out for Vista, this upgrade should make Vista more stable.

Anonymous said...

I think you are a liar. I dual boot XP and Vista, and from my experience of using both these OS on the same machine, I can tell you:

Vista RTM vs XP SP2
File transferring: vista > xp
Boot up: vista > xp
shutdown: very close
stability: vista > xp (THAT'S RIGHT!)

I have no doubt that the situation maybe reversed for other people, but my point is, once your hardware reaches a certain level, Vista is just better in every aspect. You may complain about Vista being a resource hog, but if you compare XP and Windows 3.0, you'll see the same thing.

Bottom line: Hardware is getting more powerful every year, Vista WILL be inevitable, pull your heads out of your asses, and get over it.

Anonymous said...

check this out yaa '7araa
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

Anonymous said...

Early on I have had the priviledge to test both Longhorn/Vista builds. I definately saw improvement with each build. The real problem with Vista that no one seems to address/comprehend is why Vista was created. Let me say that Vista was neither created directly for the home user or a business environment. Vista was created at the behest of the entertainment industry to protect so called premium content. This being Blu-ray and HD-DVD (HD DVD sleeps with the fishes now LMFAO!). This totally changes the game plan. Traditionally from the very beginning PCs have always been open source. When Microsoft created the infection called DRM they ineffect wanted to create a supply and demand monopoly with all their HollyWood partners to stamp out Piracy and turn your PC into little more than a Jukebox. This is why Vista is so much slower people. Vista's DRM scheme is constantly sucking 10X the memory and CPU utilization of XP because of this. There is an excellant technical paper on the internet by Computer science professor Peter Gutmann which explains this phenomena in more detail. This is why I choose XP. Vista offers no real advantage. I am sure hardware manufacturers like Intel see it as a boon.

Unknown said...

"Vista was created at the behest of the entertainment industry to protect so called premium content. This being Blu-ray and HD-DVD (HD DVD sleeps with the fishes now LMFAO!). This totally changes the game plan. Traditionally from the very beginning PCs have always been open source. When Microsoft created the infection called DRM they ineffect wanted to create a supply and demand monopoly with all their HollyWood partners to stamp out Piracy and turn your PC into little more than a Jukebox. This is why Vista is so much slower people. Vista's DRM scheme is constantly sucking 10X the memory and CPU utilization of XP because of this. There is an excellant technical paper on the internet by Computer science professor Peter Gutmann which explains this phenomena in more detail. This is why I choose XP. Vista offers no real advantage. I am sure hardware manufacturers like Intel see it as a boon."

Nothing you said here is true and the article you refer to has been debunked many times.
The DRM support built into vista you refer to isn't a microsoft thing. The DRM is on the discs and in any enviroment they are played they must meet the requirements to be played. This would be true of OSX, Linux and XP if the discs are to be played there.
This is also true of your set top player and TV. If you use component cables or if your TV doesn't support HDCP the image could be downgraded.

Also, Vista is NOT using resources checking for compliance with the DRM on the discs when the discs aren't being played.
The DRM is ONLY in effect when a protected disc is being played and ONLY if the policy on the disc requires it. So far no HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs have this check enabled on them.
Therefore no one who uses Vista is impacted by this in any way, shape or form.
It is merely an option that is there for those who want to play this content on their PC's and will not impact you if you do not.

Anonymous said...

Wow. There is certainly a truck load of XP fanboys and general idiots here:

The idiots:
(1) "VISTA is memory hog and sucks up my memory with only 10% memory free!!!" - He doesn't know VISTA does not works like XP. VISTA takes the maximum ram it can safely get and allocates it to the process.
(2) "VISTA sucks with 512MB and my geforce 4 mx card!!" - if you don't have the money to upgrade, shut up and stick with your Pentium 100Mhz machine. AFAIK, VISTA is workable on my old Athlon XP 1800+ with 768Mb RAM decently. Furthermore, RAM being so cheap now days, you'll be a bigger idiot if you don't grab 2GB now before the price rises when transition to DDR3 begins.


The XP fanboys:
(1) "It boot faster in XP than VISTA!!" - i've been dual booting VISTA/XP for sometime. A clean VISTA is not any slower in boot up compared to XP. And i find XP, when loaded with all my common software, doesn't boot that fast. They are both almost the same in general.

(2) "It's slower in XP with my XXXX benchmark!".- I don't care what your benchmark says. Everything about VIsta is that it is responsive and feels and works that way. much better than XP in fact.

(3) "My game run faster in XP!!" - So far, i see no difference in my games running in VISTA. Maybe there's a few frame drops, but if you can't see it, does it matter??

I'm not a VISTA supporter, but the ridiculous amount of bad mouthing VISTA by people who don't know what's going on, can't pay to upgrade new hardware (which you have no business upgrading your O/S in the first place, you can't expect to have the luxury of a 2.4cc car with a 1.0cc engine!!) and paranoid about some benchmark test which is dodgy at best and generally hates VISTA becoz "it's from MS!!!" really gets on my nerves!!

Anonymous said...

My new laptop came pre-installed with Vista Home (or whatever 100's of varients there are!)... It ran slow and nasty, took time to open simple things like 'My computer'. I saw the same effects on a friends PC running 2ghz dual core with 4gb of ram (don't bring up the 2gb vs 4gb here!).

I went back to XP and it's so much faster. DirectX 10 is coming to XP so theres no reason for me to run vista... Maybe if they release an SP2 that sorts out the memory issues.

Anonymous said...

for the last 8 years, my day is filled fixing poeples computer problems and doing new installations... 75% of all vista PCs/laptops we have sold in the last year have come back to us with requests to remove vista and install XP, 100% of all vista PCs/Laptops sold have come back to us with issues regarding speed.

I cannot in all good consciousness recommended Vista to Clients because of this.

and I won't bore you with the roaming profile woes that Vista brings to a business domain.

If Vista was a Dog, I would be limping and in pain, I would put it down, thats the humanne thing to do.

Anonymous said...

GUYS

Obviously vista will be slower its a much better OS at handling applications and hardware.

Look when XP came out everyone was criticing it.

obviously XP SP2 will be faster than vista SP1.

The first service pack they fix all the bugs. The next service pack they concentrate on speed


U cant compare xp sp2 and vista sp1 until Vista SP2 comes out

Anonymous said...

Gee, folks. A few of you need to learn to either spell, or at least use a spell checker. Second, it's
pretty clear that Vista is simply
more bloated than anything MS has
issued before, and therefore, it will run slower. And any moron should be able to understand that the only reason for Vista's existence is CASH FLOW, as it adds NOTHING to the experience. It improves NOTHING. Yeah, it rearranges all the menus to make it appear as though something changed, but in fact, it's all CRAP. No improvement whatsoever. In stark contrast to the latest Mac OS-X release which actually adds a BUNCH of cool new stuff, and which runs QUICK. Seriously, if you coneheads ever really got onto a Mac and figured it out, you'd never come back. It is FAR superior to MS's garbage. And I don't even own one (yet).

The "SP3 is faster" stuff is probably crap too. My tests show my MIPS and MFLOPS, as well as memory reads and writes, all dropping in speed after XP SP3. I didn't run the Office bench but my other benchmarks confirm my readings.

You joyboys running Vista can probably achieve a 20-25% performance gain by simply installing XP! Do it today! And quit jacking the rest of us off simply to make it appear that you made an "intelligent" decision in going with Vista... like the morons lined up down at Fry's on "Vista Release Day".

Vista = ME Reloaded! Puke.

Anonymous said...

Every one who runs a Vista benchmark with ONLY 1gb RAM, is an idiot. It's like to benchmark XP with 256MB RAM...Serious, folks.

Anonymous said...

Dear sir, I didn't know what's wrong, but I have tried both xp and vista and vista work faster than xp. Maybe you must check the compatibilities?

Anonymous said...

vista is much faster than xp in everything if u hva gud c2d proc and 2 gb RAM with a decent gpu

Anonymous said...

before any of you make assumptions you should try both xp and vista FOR YOURSELVES on the same machine. if you did that then you'd see XP is obviously faster (it might only seem like it because of the lack of window transitions, and eye candy) but vista will boot up and you'll be ready to go just as quickly. dont take my word for it - try it out yourselves!

Anonymous said...

FIRST BENCH MARK 2 OF THE SAME COMPUTERS,XP runs faster than vista, its all eye candy. i dont need eyecandy, but thos vista lover love it OMG, by all means use vista if eyecandy is what you loike, vista is slower in game , in networking it slow ass hell.
XP is the way to go, leanr someting first, VISTA=WINDOWS ME.

Anonymous said...

I don't think I will ever use Vista. At least I hope so! ;)

Anonymous said...

....gee, some of you people are just too much. First of all, you're comparing apples to oranges. I'm surprised no one rang in with Windows 3.1. Personally I have no issues with Vista. It loads very fast, I've never had a BSOD. It's reliable (especially with SP1) and its fast enough for me. I currently run Vista, WinXP and MAC OSX86 Leopard 10.5.2 on the same platform. I use Vista the most, as I can do much more, and in less time. For me, Leopard is just a curiosity, with poor software choices, lack of hardware choices, all this with an exorbatent price tag that'll gag any power user. Also don't you just love that 'Terminal', when you have to install some drivers. Kinda reminds me of the Amiga, I used to own years ago...hehe. Needless to say, I don't use Leopard too often 'cause I need to get work done. On the XP side of things, I use this OS for games. The 10% is a real plus. The OS is a little archaic now, and is definatly showing its EOL. Vista WILL mature, just as XP did, and it too will become just a memory, just like Win98,95,3.11,3.1, and Windows....Life goes on.

Anonymous said...

Purchased an Acer Aspire M3100 PC Dec 2007 with Vista Home Premium installed. O/S is a resource hog so turned off unneccessary services and graphics, now looks like W2K. Performanced improved but not as responsive as XP. Installed SP1 Mar 2008, noticed slight performance improvement. Don't like many of Vista's new features, such as Vista Windows Explorer. Ordered Win XP Pro yesterday. May go back to Vista if major performance improvements made by MS.

Anonymous said...

Ok people it is obvious just like any other issure in life thre are peope here who will not give an inch they are close minded.

IMHO any OS that requires you to spend thousands on hardware upgrades to make it run like xp is flawed

I run xp 64 many complain of 32 bit program issues but if you do a little research as I have all my 32bit programs run fine.

to those of you who say just buld a bigger faster pc well I am 45 and Mommy does not buy me everything.

I do not have a platinum visa
I work for a living and the idea of buying new hardware every 6 months is absurd and an unwise financial choice

I have a 2yr old system I built
2gigs ram nvidia 7800 graphics
AMD 64 2.7ghz cpu Asus a8n32SLI deluxe mobo
Not the fasest on the block but no slouch either

Now lets see buy an 9800gx2card $600.00
new quad core CPU and mobo combo
$500.00
Buy 2 sets of
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory -6400PHU2-2GBHZ
$300.00

TOTAL upgrade cost to run Vista
$1,100.00 USD
Oh and lets not forget that VISTA64ultimate price

$180.00
Total cost
$1,280.00 USD

That is only if you do not have to upgrade your power supply to run the new beefier hardware say to 700watts for stability

add 155.00

total $1,435.00
These prices were all at newegg
and that is if you build it yourself

As I said before many people do not have that kind of cash to blow just for the purpose of making vista perform well.

Madness indeed

Anonymous said...

Will Service Pack 2 games for xp will work on Service Pack 3?

Unknown said...

sp1 < sp3 !! :D

Anonymous said...

Vista is garbage, I ran many benchmarks and its horrible. It is definately Windows ME all over again.

I'm sticking with XP! If they force me to Vista, i'm moving to linux.

Anonymous said...

To people claiming that Vista is faster, especially boots faster, than xp--was that a clean XP install? Or did your machine running XP with your programs and stuff installed run slower than your clean vista install? A clean xp install would run faster than the xp install you use. Due to programs that are installed, including background services, startup programs, etc., your machine would also run faster if you did a complete windows re-install. (Even uninstalling all the programs will NOT have the same effect.) Your vista install will gradually slow down over time, as well (disregarding performance improvements by microsoft), due to secutity software, programs, and windows corruption, not to mention that you may have had viruses or spyware running on your machine without your knowledge. (Yes, it's possible, even though you have antivirus or even an internet security package installed.) I'm a professional computer technician (pc repair), and have seen plenty of computers with every windows-based operating system installed. I hope that vista can be improved-dramatically-but so far I have been unimpressed and even disappointed with vista. Yes vista does work for some people, and some people like it, but overall, xp has some huge advantages-speed and driver availability-for most users. To people complaining about this test being run against xp rtm and sp1--what is your point? That is completely irrelevent. We are talking about today's OS's, not those of yester-year.

Tip: for those who want to run vista, it helps to have several gigs of ram. I would not recommend it, with most hardware configurations, with less than 2gb, the more the better.

Anonymous said...

Whatever anybody say,
At this point of time -
"VISTA REALLY SUCKS"

Anonymous said...

This should come as NO SURPRISE to anyone who has actually used both OSes daily on IDENTICAL HARDWARE.

I benchmarked four identical spec, brand-new out-of-the-box PCs (with 2Gb RAM) AutoCAD 2008 using Cadalyst tests.

Comparing two on Vista Business with two on XP Pro (SP2), no Aero/screen savers/etc., no other apps running, just AutoCad. XP ran more than 80% faster on all tests, with the core speed differences being disk/memory access more than 120% faster. If you have any doubts about this test -- try running a benchmark own your own system.

We plan to test them again shortly with SP1, high end video cards, 4Gb RAM and Quad Core CPUs, but I very much doubt Vista can ever regain the performance advantage over XP for serious applications.

admittedly, DX10 has the edge for games, but WTF buy a PC just for games, when an X360 or PS3 will outperform any PC for a fraction of the price.

some here commented that Office 2007 isn't relevant, but that's all that 98% of PC users use every day, and tests of 2007 on OSX Bootcamp show that it runs as fast as it does on Vista with comparable hardware.

I really couldn't imagine Vista ever have been faster when it's harder swimming upstream with every passing day.

Anonymous said...

This should come as NO SURPRISE to anyone who has actually used both OSes daily on IDENTICAL HARDWARE.

I benchmarked four identical spec, brand-new out-of-the-box PCs (with 2Gb RAM) AutoCAD 2008 using Cadalyst tests.

Comparing two on Vista Business with two on XP Pro (SP2), no Aero/screen savers/etc., no other apps running, just AutoCad. XP ran more than 80% faster on all tests, with the core speed differences being disk/memory access more than 120% faster. If you have any doubts about this test -- try running a benchmark own your own system.

We plan to test them again shortly with SP1, high end video cards, 4Gb RAM and Quad Core CPUs, but I very much doubt Vista can ever regain the performance advantage over XP for serious applications.

admittedly, DX10 has the edge for games, but WTF buy a PC just for games, when an X360 or PS3 will outperform any PC for a fraction of the price.

some here commented that Office 2007 isn't relevant, but that's all that 98% of PC users use every day, and tests of 2007 on OSX Bootcamp show that it runs as fast as it does on Vista with comparable hardware.

I really couldn't imagine Vista ever have been faster when it's harder swimming upstream with every passing day.

Anonymous said...

I repair and upgrade systems for a living and have had nothing but greif from vista!, "this program is not responding" seems to be the norm with it. I have had major problems with stability with it and as for software compatibility well....... cant complain makes me more profit selling the latest "vista" compatable software :)
All this is on a new machines!
I just hope m$ getts it sorted soon!

Unknown said...

I had XP first on Amilo Pro V3205 with 1gb. The performance was pretty good. Then I switched to Vista and after disabling certain services (including Superfetch), my performance was somewhat comparable to XP (but XP outperformed). Now I upgraded to 2gb and Superfetch is on. So when computer starts it loads the data to the memory and then all the programs I use often start crazy fast - the overall performance is absolutely amazing and I am sure it outperforms XP significantly. All in all I am satisfied with Vista.

Anonymous said...

I was there, supporting hundreds of desktop & laptop systems when XP came out.

I loved it from the start. I remember at the time saying "This is the best OS Microsoft has ever made".

I immediately fell in love with the faster boot time, stability, and because all my machines had 256MB (or more) RAM, performance wasn't a problem.

Anyone who tries to compare Vista's rollout to XP is totally full of shit. No contest. XP was warmly received and popular from the start; Vista has gone over like a lead balloon.

And deservedly so, I might add. I've tried Vista on several different machines (including my own laptop) and it ranges from being annoyingly slower to downright unusable even on fairly generous hardware.

To illustrate just how shitty Vista is, go buy yourself one of those cheap $500 laptops from Circuit City or Best Buy. In their default state, running Vista, these machines are utter crap. Now install XP and watch this very same machine soar like an eagle.

A computer that barely runs Vista is typically speed demon in XP. 2GHz Core2Duo with 2GB RAM? That ain't shit in Vista - but is massive overkill running XP.

On the plus side, Vista's performance is so awful that it's actually forced computer manufacturers to raise the bar for what's considered "entry level" hardware. What this means is you can buy an ultra-cheap Vista machine and put XP on it - if you are already have XP this is a great way to high-performance on the cheap.

Anonymous said...

I agree that vista workin alot heavier compared to XP. Reason?

It is actually very simple just by setting resolutions of the game, for example, S.T.A.L.K.E.R

in vista, my game's resolution need to set to 1024*768, anything higher than that, my game prepare to get very lag.

However, in XP, i can max out my game's resolution with full details without worried that the game will be lag~

XP is just too wonderful. F*** off, vista~

Unknown said...

"It is actually very simple just by setting resolutions of the game, for example, S.T.A.L.K.E.R

in vista, my game's resolution need to set to 1024*768, anything higher than that, my game prepare to get very lag."

That's video card drivers you fool. With a new OS it takes time for drivers to mature. The biggest problem with Vista isn't Vista, it's Nvidia's drivers. They're shit.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations to VISTA - The Windows ME 2nd Edition. Better call it WimME/SE

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering why everybody is so excited with clean system performance?
Real test is always life... use something for half of year or about and then tell..
XP is even 1,5 faster in memory speed while you wont install motherboard drivers... Oops nobody noticed???
Every driver makes system slower...
Every system including MacOS and Solaris...

Form my own year expirience with Vista...
On XP if you open large file in Photoshop, something on Illustrator and Indesign... Open also some game for hour... OK
Try leaving your computer for week... On XP your photoshop will return from taskbar in pain and for half of hour about... then It will run much slower or it will close...
In the other hand on vista I can do that and everything is working quite ok... stability is "almost" like on UNIX...
I can even run Witcher in HQ and it runs ok minimize it to taskbar and make another advertisement...

My computer is always on... no hard drive stopping, sleepping, hibernation, etc.
And its not superb computer
AMD 3800X2
2GB RAM 800MHz
Good motherboard
Seagate 32MB cache drives
GF 8800 256MB

The interface is a bit changed and it confuses at the beginning on Vista... but anyone remembers windows 3.11 and DOS?

Some other things about Vista... after putting it on May 2007 to couple computers in 10 companies...
Troubles:
- old software for running a company...
- some printers
- almost all drivers(last year)... but for office use everything goes quite ok
- vista business dont allow you to disable sheduled tasks like defragmentation etc. - that is a problem ... it killed couple of hard drives on company laptops...
- CT fonts... for DTP and on special screens are a total mistake...
- some standard running programs should be optionary taken by users not predefined and lot of messing with registry to disable them...
- interface settings like wallpaper and resolution are to complicated... not metioning acces to Clear type disabling...
- multichannel sound enviroment....


Improvements:
- on most occasions closes faster than XP... system after week of working with 40-100 GB of programs and games...
- really ok for working with more than 10 programs at time (not small like calc ;D ).
- installing drivers from USB drive not floppy like on XP!!!


And for all experimentators... try to find all XP drivers for medium price range HP Pavillion... (some other brands notebooks too)


I suppose its like with a car:
- the one you can afford
- the one you like
- the one that is quite ok after some time...

Some likes Fiat and some likes Volvo...
Computer is for you...IT MUST BE FOR YOU!!!

If one doesn't like Vista it doesn't mean that it can't be totally useless...

And for mentioned ME ... I've sold approx 3000 computers with that system... 80% for office work...
Almost nobody complained...
(I'm performing 24/7 support...)
It was perfect for old computers with not so much RAM... worked really faster than 98SE...

I personally used ME for 3 years and I haven't had problems... Audigy Platinum was working ok...
Games also...
You needed to chose motherboard carefully for that one ;D that was a small secret of Me stability...

I'm using daily Vista/XP/MacOS/Solaris...

And once again to have clean system is to reinstall it weekly or about... I need 3 days to put everything into clean system to operate normally...

Best regards

Anonymous said...

True comment at the end. "ME" sucked SO BADLY. And I absolutely detest Vista - it's really awful. I get much better performance from XP.

Anonymous said...

Well, I don't know too much about the Windows XP OEM, but you should include a graph of all Windows XP editions. Also, I wonder if this was something Microsoft has known for a while, they just didn't let people get a hold of it until now? This is something very nice, and thank you for letting us know about the future of Windows XP! I truly believe Windows XP out-performs Windows Vista by a lot!

Anonymous said...

Vista is just like Windows ME.
I have 2 identical laptops, one running Vista Ultimate and the other running XP SP3. I almost never use the laptop with Vista on it because it reminds me of the painful experience I had running Windows ME years back.The only difference is years back I thought the computer was a piece of junk until I upgraded it to Windows XP and found that the computer was fine. Vista is Windows ME all over again. I can't believe I payed extra for windows Vista Ultimate, it's like paying extra for being downgraded. Just my view on the 2 operating systems and I realize some people like Vista but I'm not one of them.

Anonymous said...

I am very irritated by some of the comments here.

First off, why should an operating system require as standard 2GBs+ of RAM? Am I running an operating system or quake 4? When people say "vista runs perfectly, I have 4GBs of RAM, a geforce 8800, core 2 duo, etc etc" that really annoys me. Congratulations, you have a very hi-spec machine! Of course it will run vista, because when it takes up 2GBs of RAM doing nothing at all, you have a lot more to spare. Well guess what? Not everybody has a hi-end machine. These things cost money, more money than most people have.

Then there's the old 98 to xp argument. I have a really old computer which I don't use much anymore. It has a 400mhz celeron, 256MBs of RAM and integrated ATI graphics. It runs really well on 98. Upgrade it to xp SP2 and it SCREAMS. It works with windows media player flawlessly, can burn CDs and file browsing is perfectly smooth. It's nice and reliable, even with the luna theme turned on. I can even play some games on steam with it! You can't say xp sucked when it was released.

My computer is fairly low-end. An AMD Sempron 2600+ @ 1.6ghz, 512MBs of RAM and a geforce 6200. It's not a greta machine, but it runs xp incredibly well. I can play most games, as long as I turn down the graphics. Half-life 2 and Team Fortress 2, I can play them both at max graphics. With this in mind, I thought I would be able to run vista fine.

Dream on.

For everything, ranging from file manipulation, web browsing, even instant messaging, it was slow as hell. Disabling the services or using vlite didn't help much. Nor did disabling the glass effects or the whole desktop window manager, although compiz on ubuntu works much better. However, vista flies when I disconnect it from the internet. Why is that? I don't know. But I must restate my original argument:

WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE TO HAVE 2GBS OF RAM JUST TO RUN AN OPERATING SYSTEM? WHY DO I NEED A GAMING RIG TO RUN VISTA?

Unknown said...

"It has a 400mhz celeron, 256MBs of RAM and integrated ATI graphics. It runs really well on 98. Upgrade it to xp SP2 and it SCREAMS."

You are so full of shit. Those specs are an absolute dog for XP. I have run XP with a 1.6ghz celeron and 256mb. Same ram and 4x the processor as you and XP was unusable. Absolutely painful. I had to add another 512mb of ram to get it to where I would call it sort of usable.
I run 2gb in XP as well. 1gb IMO is the bare minimum. Anything less is too painful.
You also need to learn about Vista before you open your mouth. Vista uses idle ram to cache your commonly used apps and games. It's called superfetch. It's not using all that ram to actually run. It will run on less than 1gb. But if you have more it will use it and it's a very good thing.

Anonymous said...

I,ve no wish to make unproven, disparaging remarks about Vista. Especially since I don't use it. But I've had time to assess it on my grandaughter's new laptop over the space of two weeks.

My PC runs XP-SP2, has 1GB RAM, & an Athlon XP1800 CPU.

Her laptop also has 1GB RAM, with a dual-core 1.7Ghz Intel CPU.

My PC is ready to use from switch-on in 20 secs.

Her PC takes 90 secs. to get to a usable desktop from switch-on, despite my having replaced Norton IS with somthing less demanding, and disabling several uneccessary startup items.

RAM-wise we are comparing apples with apples --- so the result is a valid one -- Vista is slower than XP-SP2. Her CPU is more powerful than mine, which makes the comparison even more valid in favour of my XP-SP2.

No name-calling or derisory remarks from me. Just facts.

Unknown said...

You do not have to spend thousands to run Vista. In your case you don't need to spend a dime. Your system will run it fine. My 2+ year old system runs it great. A friend of mine who was running Vista likes it. He just reformatted and got the latest drivers and says it screams now. His system is 4 years old.
Your issues, like most peoples, are not Vista. People just blame the OS for bad drivers. In fact the majority of all crashes in Vista(and there is data to prove this) is Nvidia drivers. Their Vista drivers are horrible, chipset and video card. 99% of all issues in Vista can be traced back to poor 3rd party drivers. I'm lucky in that I had great drivers for my hardware on day 1. Drivers are improving. One needs to differentiate between OS problems and driver problems.
You list of upgrades is just plain silly.
Sure Vista takes a long time to get to a usuable desktop. Superfetch is in the background loading everything up. And even like OSX, Vista doesn't like to be shutoff. Instead put it to sleep. You save power and get a usuable desktop in seconds.

Anonymous said...

Ha ha, I just installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron! what a nice OS!.. is far superior to any Windows OS, it's laggy-less, comfortable, free of virus, it's bundled with lots of useful software, blah bla blah.

Microsoft: you're bypassed by a free wise-resource utilisation kernel that actually works effortless on modern computers.

Apple: your OSX is one of the greatest modern consumer OS's, by the way, I prefer to use my own hardware setup and load it with this quality Linux distro.

Cheers to all.

Unknown said...

Of course Vista will run faster than XP if the XP is old and the Vista is newly installed. One should compare the XP they have with a newly installed fresh XP and then compare that with Vista.

And I am sure the quad processor computers with USB external drives or whatever will work better with operating systems that were ready for them. But what about the normal one proc computers, the many laptops, IDE drived Duron computer with 368 MB RAM that I have at home?

I am not looking for an operating system that treats my computer like a game does. "You want to play it, then upgrade everything". I will even consider Vista when I buy a new computer. And I saw one perform on a new laptop and it was embarassingly slow, really.

Anonymous said...

I have Vista running on a high end Dell Core 2 Duo and SP1 made it slower despite 4GB RAM, 7200RPM SATA, etc.

SP3 seems about the same is not a little quicker on an almost 4 year old custom built ASUS/AMD chipset system with 2GB RAM/7200 RPM drives.

Vista is ME 2007/2008. Most everyone likes XP better because of speed and many businesses have no incentive to touch Vista.

I suspect Windows 7 will get rid of the multiple different versions and will be named XP Ultimate Home or XP Ultimate Professional.

Vista is a failure unless SP2 is a masterpiece.

Anonymous said...

vista is a pretty outdated os compared to new linux kernels and mac os, it is at least 1/2 the performance of xp sp2 on the same hardware(none of which needs replaced with xp) so why bother...
i think its time to stop microsoft making xp obsolete until they have at least a suitable replacement. anyone who says vista is quick is an idiot. i also find the vista graphics very ugly.and this new game of c;licking on 3 pages to find what xp gave in 1 is sooo frustrating - eg network properties! and thats before i even mention the lag with network browsing, does it need to query the entire domain everytime???i hate it with a passion and will be moving to macs when xp/2003 are discontinued(macs/unix will have good workable active directory by then so why bother with a legacy company like ms)
ps. i loved ms until vista!

Anonymous said...

Don't laugh. I just replaced my old clone PC running ME with a Dell Optiplex 330 Core 2 Duo 2.2. 2G RAM and integrated Intel GMA3100 graphic.

It came with XP Professional pre-installed. I also installed Vista Ultimate as dual boot to determine which I will settle on. For light usage like Office 2007, some old DOS programs and surfing. Vista boot and launch Firefox a bit faster and it look prettier to me. On Office, no different. So I am deleting my XP.

Anonymous said...

This is hilarious. Could we see some benchmarks on 3D and physics performance, since when we talk about *performance* we generally don't care about word counts taking 6 seconds instead of 8, we'd like to see some increase in gaming frames-per-second.

And you KNOW DAMN WELL that Vista on a single gigabyte of memory is as sluggish as can be - why are you not benchmarking on that? Especially as buying a new budget laptop with Vista preinstalled will come with only one gigabyte or less, which is what the majority of users will have to hand.

Basically you can say (and show through statistics) whatever you like. Real-world performance will show time and time again that fewer backgrouond processes and operating system cruft will yield better results. To obtain those results, you revert to previous versions of Windows. Less cruft, more speed.

Anonymous said...

Its riduculous that you are running the tests on a machine with 1GB RAM. The benefits of Vista are only visible if you have over 2GB RAM.

Anonymous said...

Well, this is business cycle. If Vista can support other software written for XP then everyone will be happy. We are paying more money to update other software than the OS itself.

So just stick with what you have and don't be fooled by this software companies.

Any new OS that does not support older software might as well as all the programmer stay at home eat grass.

Anonymous said...

How many PCs use more than an average few percent of their CPU power? What is 10% for 5%....0.5% No matter which OS is used there is a shameful pittance of useful CPU cycles used. A small chess program(me) can use more CPU than most other games, and can use any amount thrown at it without limit.

Anonymous said...

Haven't tried SP3 yet, but as for the XP vs Vista debate, XP gets my vote. I actually bought Vista and installed home and pro on 2 different PCs - I can only say that it's the worst piece of crap I've ever seen. Either use XP or Linux, or both (like I do) but please stay away from that pathetic wannabe-OS called "Vista."

Anonymous said...

I just installed SP3 on my laptop and my office pc. Because WinXP Prof. seems to run faster now i started googeling if other users experienced the same. This way i find this site. Nice to see that MS really has done a nice piece of work with SP3. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Installed Xp sp3 - having problems with video editing. Tried to use Windows Movie Maker, Nero Vision and Ulead Studio DVD. It causes sound distortion and programs crashes.
Crashes of windows explorer have happened too.

I have Intel Core 2 Duo 4500 2GB ram.

Anonymous said...

I'm a IT Director, this is what I have at home.

Asus 939, AMD x2 dual core 4200+
3 gig DDR ram
250, gig, 320 gig, 500 gig, 80 gig, 100 gig hard drives
Geforce 8600 GTS 256mb
OS (Dual boot) Windows Vista x64 Ultimate (OEM), 2nd Windows XP Media Center

What I have noticed...
1. Vista is a redesigned Windows ME, so many bugs even when you have updated.
2. Slow

I'm about to reformat that vista drive and use it as storage

I also have a:
939 Gigabyte Ultra mobo
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
2 gig of ram
two 80 gig hard drives
geforce fx 5500 256mb

which runs faster than any vista system i have dealt with. It even runs faster than my gaming system.
thing is faster than.

My company will be staying with XP Pro, vista can kiss my ass.

Anonymous said...

Right...LOL..you run a VISA OS, with 1GB of ram, and complain about it being slow?

Give me a break!

Try another benchmark machine!

Anonymous said...

You are missing the point. No OS should REQUIRE 2 GB of ram to run and call itself better than XP. Period.

With that said, Vista is the worst OS since ME and 95 beta. Even MS is essentially admitting to it by already starting development on a new OS...1 year after Vista's release. By comparison it took over 3 years after XP was released before Vista really started being developed.

Another case and point...1 year after XP's release 33% of windows users were upgraded to it. 1 year after Vista....a whopping 8% upgraded....flop-o-rama.

XP wins hands down in performance, usability, and functionality.

Anonymous said...

agree on above.

Anonymous said...

Well SP2 on XP seems to me to be the you can have. I think Vista isn´t as pragmatic as XP is.

Anonymous said...

here is the deal. nt and me were total crap. then microsoft came out with xp. now most people have xp. then vista comes out. it has bug just like any os would have. microsoft, might be, working to come out with some more sp for vista. for right now, vista has a higher graphical load then xp just like xp has a higher load then say 2000. once the hardware on computers increases, the performance gap between xp and vista will shrink. fyi-put in a new nvidia or radeon video card and your performance in xp and vista will both increase since the processing of the graphics goes to the card not your processor.

Anonymous said...

How (purely out of interest) fast would say 98 SE operate these (if its possible) I'd love to see a comparison betwen 98 and Vista

Anonymous said...

Hello....agree on above

by
computer internet technology

Anonymous said...

I had XP SP3 for several weeks, and saw more blue screens than in previous 2 years. Plus it had another scary effect when video signal suddenly disappeared and did not wake up for 10 minutes even after complete power down, including PSU. I have no idea how it's even possible (yes, I have checked the temperature as well), but after removing SP3 not one blue screen and not one video signal problem. At work, tried SP3 on one domain user, and same thing, uninstalled in 1 week - though not because of blue screen but inexplicable delays on opening explorer windows.

Looks like it's not stable, and not tested well. The latter has become Microsoft brand feature since beta testing is handled offshore. The first product of this innovation was Vista, by the way.

Anonymous said...

The fact is that Microsoft has lured people into buying Vista although XP is a much better option despite it being close to a decade old. And the final straw was when they announced that they are withdrawing sales of XP OEMs. It's pretty much clear from the much hyped Windows 7 that Microsoft wanted to make a huge shift to Vista and then force the new Windows 7 onto the helpless people later on... No offense but I'm just expressing my views.

Vegas Games said...

I will not be changing to Vista even if i was paid!

Anonymous said...

I think the comparisons that have been made between Vista and ME, [Vista = ME Reloaded], is based on the fact that Microsoft has pretty much wiped MEs existance away as if it was never released, much like they are now doing with Vista by moving the next Windows release up to early 2009, instead of late 2010 as was planned, because MS wants the memories of Vista to disappear just as much as they wanted those of ME to disappear.

Anonymous said...

i used to think the best os upgrade i would ever make was from ME to XP, but now i have to say the uprgrade from Vista, back to XP has been the greatest.

Anonymous said...

Watch how MS will sweep away the "Vista" name as soon as it can. "Vista" is headed for an early grave because of its bad reputation. Even though Windows 7 will be based on Vista, MS will dump the Vista moniker as soon as possible, replacing "Vista" with "Windows 2009" or some other name. Even if Vista, the operating system, performs for you, having the "Vista" brand on your machine is getting more uncool by the day; so be prepared to shell out even more $$$ to upgrade when Windows 7 replaces Vista. With Windows 7 on the horizon, I think it's crazy to spend hundreds of dollars on, what will effectively be, a double upgrade.

Anonymous said...

This article is bogus, I agree that Vista really sucks, but from what I've heard about SP3 it causes major crashes to a bunch of computers, and to the computers it works on it slows them a little.

Anonymous said...

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ?????

do you have problem purchasing 4GB or RAM instead of 2? The cost for RAM these days is ... nothing !!!

Install Vista SP1 with 4GB of ram, get rid of various meaningless things and you'll have a stable system. I know i have and using it alot...

Stop arguing about "1% slower etc...." or go back to Win 2000.

You talking about XP like they didn't need more from Windows 2000 to run smooth. I think you're forgettting....

SO UPGRADE TO VISTA, UPGRADE YOUR SYSTEM (like you did for XP) AND THEN COME WITH RESULTS.

and who gives a f*** if the system needs 2GB just to run.... when GB's of RAM nowdays are cheaper than chocolate.

Anonymous said...

Just install yellowTAB BeOS 1.2 (Service pack 1) and see a completely different operating system that is damn quick and like no other ;)

Anonymous said...

What do you all mind makers say about this:
On my PII 400 Mhz System with 384 MB RAM a little bit tuned Version of Windows XP runs convenable. Can you put Vista or any other recent Linux Distribution with GUI to be as responsive and patched as XP is?I think, if any Intel or MS salesman reads this he will immediately put up a strategy to force users like me to upgrade. Well, perhaps i would have to upgrade then ... to Via C3 and a self compiled Linux with xcfe.

Anonymous said...

i have to say that vista premium runs twice as fast on my dell d620 laptop,3 gigs ram 1.7 ghz duo core 256 nvidia quadro.not sure why i have reinstalled fresh again and again xp media center edition,did a dual boot even,nothing the vista is just way faster,i mean i actually get the flashlight when i go to pictures or what not,with vista boom ,instantly there,i have page filing off,only for vista of course.got even faster,i have usually seen xp be faster but,i am puzzled,i ran 2 gig dual channel with the xp and tried 3 gig ram,the vista still was faster.i would usually agree about the xp hauling butt.not in this case.just putting out my info and experience.c ya

Anonymous said...

win xp3 patches xp2 to kill it or add / inject some deformities / confusion obviously to make way for vista or else more find/buy more time for which m$ has the only solution aka win 2k9 bla bla. herd mentality - latest m$ warez showoff - gets more $$$$. vista is just as change of skin.

Anonymous said...

I read an article on this a few minutes ago and it says "After a disappointing showing by Windows Vista SP1 (see previous post), we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (v.3244) delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS. Testing with OfficeBench showed an 10 performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP w/Service Pack 2." the article title is "Windows XP SP3 Yields Performance Gains Over Vista SP1"

Cheers,
Baylor

Anonymous said...

yes , vista is slow, look at me.. I removed some programs because I was surprised that a lot of the GB were used... and here reading it seems that "vista eats up like 15-17 Gbs of memory while xp only eats up about 2-5" ... I want a fast computer ... otherwise I wouldnt have bought a new one... and I don't to deal with those questions (there are some programs blocked... which are the ones of intel and nod.. in which I trust but I can't change this configuration of windows)...
Somehow, sometimes it takes a lot of time to show webpages.. it takes like 3 times what my old computer would take!!

Anonymous said...

XP: Performance, Low Hardware Requirements

Vista: Stability, Appearance

XP vs Vista in a nutshell.

Anonymous said...

Vista is either badly coded software, or it was purposely coded to be resource hungry in order to require users to invest much further in new and additional hardware.
It is understandable that a few home users (who think they know about the IT industry) would like Vista because it looks "pretty", but experts (such as myself) that work in the IT industry recognise that XP greatly out performs Vista, and that Vista should definitely be avoided for the business environment.
Vista is indeed ME reloaded.
It is a joke that Vista is not compatible with so much existing hardware and software. It is just a ploy to get foolish individuals to replace and upgrade existing hardware and software unnecessarily, but at least IT professionals realise that and, on the whole, are staying clear of it.
What about Windows 7? Microsoft assures us not to worry, because they claim that Windows 7 will be completely compatible with absolutely EVERYTHING that runs on Windows Vista.
....How stupid do Microsoft think we are? I wonder how many people out there, after being foolish enough to invest in Windows Vista and discover it's not compatible with their current environment, would then be even more foolhardy as to invest in Windows 7, which(being as it's just as compatible with EVERYTHING that runs on Windows Vista) is once again, incompatible with most users and businesses current environment.
Let's hope Microsoft get their act together and adjust their intentions for Windows 7, and make Windows 7 what Windows Vista should have been - The rightful successor to Windows XP.

Unknown said...

What's funny is most "IT professionals" think they are so smart when in reality they haven't got a clue.

Anonymous said...

i am looking forward to windows 7

Anonymous said...

If I didn't use my pc for gaming, I'd use Linux without even thinking about it. I was thinking about changing to Vista only because it enables me to use Mobility CrossFire.. I've read that by enabling crossfire performance in games is gained by 1.5 times. But if you add this boost to slowness of vista, do I really gain anything??

Anonymous said...

Well obviously!

Vista is a more recent Operating system and takes more powerful hardware to get the same 'feel' you would on your somewhat outdated XP machine.

You could take the same machine and claim that 98 is faster than XP, 95 faster than 98 etc...

I mean.. talk about the obvious.

Anonymous said...

how can i downgrade this
windows xp sp3 v.3244
where is the uninstaller??

george said...

i hope windows 7 will have all these fixes in place....

Anonymous said...

Even though i was using Vista x64 i hated it sooooo much,
Windows x64 ran much faster for me,
and thats with out any tweaks,

Vista i had to tweak the crap out of it before i had a decent platform to work off,

I wasnt over the moon when i heard of Windows 7 specially after what Vista produced,

But been using Windows 7 Build 7600 for a while now and Love this OS to bits...

Registry Cleaners said...

why do i feel that SP2 more faster than SP3, is there any other hardware requirement?

cheap computers said...

I think the price reduction has been achieved by stripping out the odd feature that most netbook buyers would hardly have used.

Anonymous said...

You all mocking around Windows ME, but for me after testing it about x years ago, was the finest, stable windows ever ! I even captured movies in it with my Winfast tv2000xp deluxe, play games in it, it was way stable than windows 95, or windows 98 or windows 98se. So you better prove what you are saying... Also I remember that i did some tweaking in Windows ME after installing it.