tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12858493283447300842011-12-02T18:32:53.414+04:00The official blog for the editors and research staff of the exo.performance.network (<a href="http://www.xpnet.com">www.xpnet.com</a>)Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.comBlogger631100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-51689708811835636832010-07-16T02:31:00.001+04:002010-07-16T02:31:44.839+04:00

It’s been nearly 4 years since we first began offering our free, hosted performance analysis services to the general public. During that time we’ve registered over 24,000 users and assembled the world’s most comprehensive repository of real-world Windows metrics data ever created. By almost every measure, the exo.performance.network has been a success. Which is why it pains us to announce that,

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-69267024359380101592010-05-31T23:10:00.001+04:002010-05-31T23:11:52.507+04:00

After two months of heads-down development, punctuated by several design breakthroughs and a very successful commercial beta cycle, we’re pleased to announce the release of DMS Clarity Suite 10. This next generation of the DMS Clarity Framework provides us with a robust new platform on which to base a variety of exciting on-site and hosted performance monitoring and management offerings. Figure

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-66468648518882499572010-04-27T14:56:00.001+04:002010-04-27T14:56:54.817+04:00

A comeuppance. That’s how I describe the recent Gawker-Gizmodo-iPhone theft debacle. What the organization in question did – paying cold, hard cash for what was ostensibly stolen property – was plainly criminal, and those behind the act are now being held accountable. One would hope that such a well-publicized incident would serve to temper the blogosphere’s appetite for sensationalism. The

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-88978381904997982972010-04-26T17:32:00.001+04:002010-04-26T17:32:14.943+04:00

In a stunning reversal of nearly twenty years of progressive performance erosion, the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity suite, Office 2010, is actually faster than its immediate predecessor, Office 2007. Testing with the cross-version OfficeBench 7 test script shows Office 2010 to be roughly 9% faster overall when running on an identically configured Windows 7 desktop

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-36370477707512441332010-04-08T14:06:00.001+04:002010-04-08T14:15:51.963+04:00

Walking and chewing gum. It’s a simple idea – you do one thing while at the same time doing another, with your brain shuffling between the two (and various unrelated autonomic functions) to keep the whole parade in step. Modern computers are similarly adept at juggling concurrent tasks -we PC users call it “multitasking.” Yet for users of iPhone OS-based devices, including the new iPad,

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-86854429928497021322010-03-26T12:06:00.001+04:002010-03-26T13:13:49.050+04:00

Big surprise! Both VMware and Citrix have fallen behind schedule in delivering their “bare metal” hypervisors for client computing. Both had promised to deliver solutions by the end of 2009, but now VMware has reset that goal to the end of this year while Citrix has stopped talking about ship dates altogether. So, what happened? In a word, hardware. Or more precisely, the ever changing

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-17716806129216000052010-03-23T15:32:00.001+04:002010-03-23T15:32:54.189+04:00

As a commercial web developer, I’m constantly on the lookout for new trends in browser adoption and usage. After all, there are only so many hours in a day, and investing time and energy supporting a faltering standard is both frustrating and inefficient. So it was with some hesitation that I approached our latest project: A complete overhaul of the user interface for our commercial metrics

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-14231301105626252952010-03-19T10:08:00.001+04:002010-03-19T10:15:49.426+04:00

It will go down in history as one of the more anti-climactic “surprise” announcements. Microsoft’s Windows XP Mode, which was billed as an eleventh hour killer feature for Windows 7, arrived with a thud, thanks in large part to its curious need for Hardware Assisted Virtualization (HAV) support. The company’s media apologists quickly scrambled to defend the decision, pointing out that most new

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-51086920238534232102010-03-16T11:14:00.001+04:002010-03-16T11:17:02.972+04:00

As OfficeBench approaches its 10th anniversary it’s time to look back at the history of this iconic test script. With over a million downloads, and with countless copies of its various incarnations in circulation around the globe, OfficeBench is one of the most widely deployed business productivity test scripts in history. And we’re still improving it, with the latest incarnation – OfficeBench 7

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-39578643690521611692010-03-11T09:39:00.001+04:002010-03-16T11:15:13.625+04:00

This is a post I hoped I wouldn’t have to write. After watching for over two weeks as InfoWorld misrepresented the particulars of my resignation as Enterprise Desktop blogger, I feel I’ve given the publication ample opportunity to come clean and admit they were complicit in the Craig Barth ruse. Since it’s now clear that no such admission is forthcoming, I feel I have no choice but to release

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-90396592919891544342010-03-10T11:48:00.001+04:002010-03-10T11:52:57.372+04:00

Windows 7 is on a tear. The latest statistics from the exo.repository show Microsoft’s newest client OS installed across 11% of participating systems. That’s over double the percentage that reported running Windows 7 at the beginning of the year, and the fastest penetration of any Microsoft desktop OS on record. Figure 1 - Community OS Share Today The big loser in this sea change is Windows

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-22129528741150659352010-03-08T21:53:00.001+04:002010-03-08T21:53:40.423+04:00

Life as a Windows developer has its ups and downs. On the positive side, you’re associated with the most popular computing platform in history, which translates into lots of potential clients. But this also means you’re subject to the design whims of a notoriously proprietary software company. And as often as not, these changes come back to bite you in the most unusual places. Take my most

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-53494564193913665922010-03-08T10:09:00.001+04:002010-03-08T10:09:29.054+04:00

Want to know what separates Windows 7 users from their XP-loving contemporaries? Try 342 additional execution threads chewing-up an extra 711MB of RAM while spending over 2/3 more time running in Windows’ privileged “kernel mode.” At least that’s what the latest Windows telemetry data uploaded to the exo.repository seems to indicate. By analyzing the approximately 1 to 1.7 million process

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-57818635870031833492010-03-04T18:05:00.001+04:002010-03-04T18:05:18.840+04:00

One of the things about the exo.repository that we most like to demonstrate is how it allows us to extract market trending data points that nobody else has. Whether it’s the rate at which internal IE organizations are shedding IE 6.0 (hint: it’s a stampede), or how a new version of Windows is driving base RAM configurations through the roof, we love it when we come out with something truly unique

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-49141216472578852022010-03-02T16:19:00.001+04:002010-03-02T16:19:25.135+04:00

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve just passed the 24,000 registered user level. Thanks to an influx of new contributors from Poland (Viva Polska!), the exo.performance.network went over that heady mark earlier today, bringing our total repository statistics to a new all-time high: Over 240 million system metrics records – per week! Over 14 billion process metrics

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-60859845753115451032010-03-02T01:33:00.001+04:002010-03-02T06:40:56.989+04:00

Google Chrome is on fire. The latest snapshot from the exo.repository shows the nascent web browser running on nearly one out of every four (24.88%) PCs monitored by the exo.performance.network. This represents a 2 percentage point jump in a single week, and a nearly 7 percentage point jump since the beginning of the year. Figure 1 – Web Browser Usage Share Meanwhile, Internet Explorer

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-32473669211700132972010-02-26T17:09:00.001+04:002010-02-26T18:25:27.163+04:00

I read with some amusement the recent account by an Intel IT engineer of how the company has been forced to repeatedly delay its migration away from Windows XP due to concerns for, among other things, Internet Explorer 6.0 add-on compatibility and support for applications that still use 16-bit code in places where, quite frankly, they shouldn’t. It’s the latest in a long line of “public displays

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-45304184193086896212010-02-25T12:41:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:18:17.916+04:00

Those who have followed me on InfoWorld and elsewhere know that I’m a big fan of application virtualization. The idea of bottling-up all of the messy deposits from a typical Windows application installation into an easy-to-deploy, self-contained package has always seemed like a good idea to me. And during my extensive testing of various “appvirt” solutions, I’ve developed some strong opinions

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-26513685025065660302010-02-25T10:50:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:20:40.621+04:00

The latest data from the exo.repository shows Windows 7 driving a measurable surge in average RAM configurations across the nearly 24,000 registered xpnet.com contributors. According to repository snapshots taken in the weeks following the Windows 7 launch, the average RAM configuration for PCs running Microsoft’s newest OS has increased from 3.15GB on November 30th, 2009, to 3.76GB on February

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-37658440326909572322010-02-24T16:56:00.001+04:002010-03-11T13:21:38.005+04:00

Note: Please see my follow-up post which sheds more light on what InfoWorld knew and when, including an email thread that proves the publication’s complicity in the Craig Barth ruse. Public falls from grace. We all love to watch them unfold. Whether it’s a golfer with libido issues, or some blowhard blogger getting his comeuppance, we just can’t get enough of it. The sordid details. The

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-90848145604993328192010-02-23T16:42:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:22:06.710+04:00

Much has been made recently of ZDNet’s so-called “expose” (really a smear piece) about our software. And one of the most disturbing accusations is that we were exposing user data by having our tracker agent communicate over the unsecured TCP Port 80. As evidence, ZDNet blogger Jason Perlow offered up network traffic sniffer data showing our client communicating in the open and without encryption.

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-72068480379955946992010-02-23T10:57:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:18:43.348+04:00

The latest WCPI snapshot – taken at 12:00AM EDT on 2/23/2010 – shows the Peak Memory Pressure Index value for Windows 7 improving, but not by much. An influx of new Windows 7 systems in the past few weeks is serving to reshape the exo.repository’s demographics. And this, in turn, is being felt in the WCPI calculations, which are becoming increasingly influenced by Microsoft’s latest and greatest.

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-39860338388222877992010-02-22T15:42:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:22:48.775+04:00

A recent influx of new clients to the repository has shifted the demographic of our user base once again. Windows 7, which had been lagging in the low-mid single digits in terms of usage share, has jumped a whopping 4% points in the past few weeks. Microsoft’s latest and greatest is poised to break into double-digit usage share territory in the next 30 days, with much of its gains coming at the

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-33240110407753679742010-02-22T11:00:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:21:34.879+04:00

Raw nerves. You know you’ve hit one when the entity in question practically jumps through the roof to staunch the pain. In my case, the nerve belonged to Microsoft Corporation. And true to form, the company spent incalculable political capital – and cashed in more than a few favors – in order to orchestrate the most one-sided smear campaign in the history of IT journalism. What has been said

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com49tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-63586112353403843922010-02-21T09:19:00.001+04:002010-02-21T09:58:14.918+04:00

It took three days, countless idiotic comments (some too obscene for us to approve), and more than a little patience, but finally somebody bothered to do what anybody with half a clue could have done all along. SirBruce, one of our new favorite readers, actually took the time to fire-up the only performance monitoring tool that matters (ironically, called “Performance Monitor”), and start logging

Randall C. Kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11388524265141175059noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-26460849060020998312010-02-21T03:39:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:26:07.398+04:00

While Windows 7 may have weight issues, there’s no disputing it’s a very responsive OS. Microsoft has gone to tremendous lengths to ensure that the end-user experience with Windows 7 is a positive one. So it comes as no surprise that, upon reviewing processor-related system metrics data from our network of over 23,000 Windows IT sites, we found Windows 7 to be quite efficient “under the hood.”

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-37266702103148313492010-02-19T13:20:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:25:25.615+04:00

Upated: Thanks to an industrious reader, we finally have outside confirmation that our understanding of this issue was dead on. Yes, Virginia, this means we were right and you were wrong. So before you go posting yet another idiotic comment parroting yet another clueless blogger from yet another obscure corner of the Internet, please read our editorial titled “What took you so long?” The

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-8902916433037150292010-02-18T21:31:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:24:50.058+04:00

The Windows Composite Performance Index (WCPI) is a new industry metric built upon the foundations of one the most robust and sophisticated performance analysis frameworks ever devised. The DMS Clarity Suite framework was created by a former Intel Corporation performance engineer who specialized in the design and implementation of next generation benchmarking methodologies. It has been deployed

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-60568885045420427222010-02-17T10:43:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:26:54.949+04:00

Updated: Thanks to an industrious reader, we finally have outside confirmation that our understanding of this issue was dead on. Yes, Virginia, this means we were right and you were wrong. So before you go posting yet another idiotic comment parroting yet another clueless blogger from yet another obscure corner of the Internet, please read our editorial titled “What took you so long?”

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-12741238889057967292010-02-17T09:37:00.001+04:002010-02-26T17:24:14.620+04:00

The exo.performance.network is proud to announce the debut of our latest industry performance metric. The Windows Composite Performance Index (WCPI) is a comprehensive measurement of Microsoft Windows PC performance as observed at IT sites from around the globe. Based on data collected by our network of nearly 24,000 registered users, the WCPI delivers an easy-to-read, single number index

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-62965596812758776392010-02-10T12:19:00.001+04:002010-02-21T02:41:40.645+04:00

Like a hot coal fresh from the fire, enterprise IT organizations are dropping Microsoft’s buggy, insecure Internet Explorer 6.0 web browser as fast as they can. Current data from the exo.repository shows a dramatic spike in IE 8.0 adoption, with over 70% of Windows XP systems – sampled from the exo.performance.network’s IT-centric community of nearly 23,000 registered sites – now running

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-16607880330218497062010-02-09T10:27:00.001+04:002010-02-21T02:42:58.999+04:00

The era of the 64-bit Windows desktop has arrived. An analysis of system disclosure data as collected by the exo.repository shows that, in the post-Vista era, the global Windows desktop architecture has shifted heavily in favor 64-bit computing. One out of every two (50%) Windows 7 systems is now running the 64-bit version of the OS. By contrast, less than one in five (19%) of Vista systems

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-56878846010179185182010-02-04T13:48:00.001+04:002010-02-21T02:44:51.850+04:00

In an earlier posting, we documented how enterprise IT shops were bucking the web browser market share trend by continuing to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer extensively across their Windows-based client systems. At the time, we speculated that this was due to IE-specific requirements for legacy in-house applications, and that the significant penetration within these shops of both Firefox (50%)

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-38744015427812596882009-09-09T12:45:00.001+04:002009-09-09T13:47:14.218+04:00

Surprise! Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the dominant web browser among enterprise users. After reviewing the latest browser usage statistics from the exo.repository, we found that over 80% of users at large IT organizations continue to use IE at least 4 hours a day, a result that contradicts the conventional wisdom that IE’s usage share is declining overall. Figure 1 – Latest Browser

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-7125110939699545432009-09-09T12:24:00.001+04:002009-09-09T13:47:44.804+04:00

We’re pleased to announce the availability of our latest free service offering: The exo.charts library is a collection of dynamically updating chart objects that provide a targeted view into the contents of the exo.repository. Figure 1 – a sample chart form the exo.charts library For example, there are objects that track market share for popular software categories and others that expose

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-85381627705608768702009-08-05T21:40:00.001+04:002009-08-05T21:40:00.740+04:00

Just when we thought it was safe to dismiss the conventional wisdom and recommend Windows 7 RTM for immediate deployment, along comes a last minute “showstopper” bug to make us look like fools. It appears that Microsoft missed a potentially critical flaw in its current NTFS driver stack, resulting in a massive memory leak when certain file access patterns – namely, those involved in the file data

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-62533620484479639102009-08-03T20:41:00.001+04:002009-08-03T20:47:13.233+04:00

We received a tremendous response to our previous series of entries documenting the expansive memory requirements of today’s multi-process web browsers. At the time, Internet Explorer 8.0 had just entered its second beta release, while Chrome 1.0 was still under wraps at Google. Both proved to be massive memory hogs, requiring tens of megabytes of RAM to render each opened tab. Eight months

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-40062905996247197202009-07-31T21:39:00.001+04:002009-07-31T21:41:07.804+04:00

IT organizations considering their long-term Windows deployment plans should forgo the conventional “wait for Service Pack 1” wisdom and instead move directly to Windows 7 upon its release. That is our conclusion based on an analysis of the RTM build. Using the tools and resource of the exo.repository, we put Microsoft’s new OS through its paces and came away satisfied that it is indeed ready for

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-89136194920605665562009-01-15T11:22:00.001+04:002009-01-15T11:26:04.082+04:00

It’s official: The exo.performance.network recently registered it’s 10,000th contributing site. We can now state confidently that the exo.repository has truly reached a critical mass level, with live metrics data streaming in via Windows systems from every corner of the globe. Now that we’re passed our initial community building stage, expect more frequent updates to the exo.blog as we begin to

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-62012543500247141332009-01-15T11:06:00.001+04:002009-01-15T11:06:03.129+04:00

We’re pleased to announce the release of our first white paper from the exo.performance.network project. Titled “Application Virtualization 2008/2009,” this original research deliverable provides a comprehensive look at the execution overhead and runtime performance characteristics of the leading application virtualization solutions from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and Symantec. Highlights include

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-34009937424769088102008-09-04T10:13:00.001+04:002008-09-04T10:13:21.494+04:00

After posting our controversial findings about memory usage under IE 8 and Chrome (see previous post here and here), we received feedback from some our our readers criticizing our use of the Process\Working Set counter values to size the various browser processes. The complaint was that this counter does not factor code (OCX, DLLs, et al) shared across the various process instances. Fortunately,

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-15949906328802712582008-09-03T02:23:00.001+04:002008-09-03T02:24:33.630+04:00

Earlier this week, we posted our findings from a 3-way browser comparison we had conducted featuring Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2) and Firefox 3.01. As we were going to “print,” we learned that Google was readying its own foray into the browser market – Google Chrome – prompting us to quickly revisit our test scenario to add this high-profile newcomer to the mix. Note

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-1495687882656855352008-09-01T22:42:00.001+04:002008-09-01T22:42:44.921+04:00

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 arrived last week amid great expectations and some heated controversy. The latter was due to Microsoft’s decision to adopt a standards-compliant rendering model that breaks a great many IE-specific web sites. However, while various bloggers and pundits waxed breathlessly about all of the new bells and whistles (including the much-reported “porn mode”), we were busy

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-75425748461507436822008-08-21T11:58:00.001+04:002008-08-21T12:07:24.967+04:00

One of the items we like to track within the exo.repository is the adoption rate for new OS service packs. The results serve as a kind of customer satisfaction survey for each new version of Windows. Note: For more information on the exo.performance.network, or to register for your free Analysis Portal account, visit www.xpnet.com. For example, when we take a look at Windows Vista, over the

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-18820533456010147922008-03-05T21:21:00.001+04:002008-03-05T21:21:23.582+04:00

If you've been paying attention to the various industry news outlets you've no doubt come across the story about the Microsoft engineer advocating Windows Server 2008 as a "workstation" OS. According to him, if you make the right tweaks - installing the Desktop Experience feature, adding a few missing utilities, tuning the scheduler - you can turn Server 2008 into a fairly convincing Vista

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com47tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-78075129483356656462008-01-30T13:36:00.001+04:002008-01-30T13:36:24.164+04:00

Now for something totally different: Widgets! What are widgets? Generically speaking, they're small mini-applets that run on your desktop or in a dashboard-type page or view. In the case of the exo.performance.network, widgets are small slices of functionality that have been broken-out from the main Analysis Portal site and presented as a stand-alone UI for a specific data type. For example,

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-16703991833991515082008-01-30T13:20:00.001+04:002008-01-30T13:20:35.657+04:00

We're pleased to announce that we've completed our move to the new server. The exo.performance.network is now hosted on a state of the art PowerEdge 2950 with 8x 2.66Ghz Xeon CPU Cores (2x E5430), 8GB of RAM and 1.2TB of storage in a six-disk RAID. It's a nice step-up from our previous "Prestonia" Xeon dinosaur and should give us the capacity to reach our goal of 10K users by summer. Also, we

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-70199170176542253722007-12-13T22:19:00.001+04:002007-12-13T22:20:21.645+04:00

During our most recent round of testing we covered Windows Vista with the Service Pack 1 Release Candidate bits running both Office 2007 and Office 2003. Now that Service Pack 1 for Office 2007 has been released we decided to revisit the tests with the updated bits for Word, Excel and PowerPoint in place. Once again, we ran the tests on the same 2GHz Core 2 Duo Laptop (Dell XPS M1710) with 2GB

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-4578528380657799962007-12-02T02:05:00.001+04:002007-12-02T11:19:38.517+04:00

We at the exo.performance.network pride ourselves on having relatively "thick skins." After all, when you have the audacity to actually take a position on the issues - and then to back them up with hard data - you're bound to bring out the zealots on the other side. However, it's a rare treat when the shots sent our way hail from no less an industry authority than Microsoft. Yes, it seems our

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-24520043732594827032007-11-29T10:27:00.001+04:002007-11-29T10:31:39.921+04:00

As an ongoing service to the greater Windows IT community, we're publishing the first of our weekly "snapshots" of OS and application usage rates as measured within our own little corner of the industry. These numbers are current as of 06:00 GMT and based on a sample of set of 1,106 contributor systems: Figure 1 - Contributor Usage by OS Type/SKU Interpretation: While Windows XP (55%) still

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-36090380375428403282007-11-28T14:23:00.001+04:002007-11-28T14:23:54.501+04:00

In an effort to further clarify our previous test results, we decided to experiment a bit with Vista to see how it would perform with a majority of its newer UI elements and background services turned off. In the process, we believe we've come up with a roadmap of sorts for how to "make Vista run like XP" (sort of): Shutdown "Unnecessary" Services - This means killing all those new Vista

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-3298780405030818852007-11-27T03:10:00.001+04:002007-11-27T03:13:11.834+04:00

Many of our members have requested that we re-test Vista SP1 with 2GB of RAM instead of the 1GB we used in our original tests. So, without further delay, we present our revised results table: Figure 1 - Revised OfficeBench Completion Times (Seconds) Analysis: By providing Vista (SP1) with an additional 1GB of RAM (that's a total of 2GB for those of you keeping score) we managed to achieve a "

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-5581526704851998532007-11-23T19:38:00.001+04:002007-11-23T20:14:35.626+04:00

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.   Figure 1 - OfficeBench Completion Times (

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com197tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-53310413040712533352007-11-18T21:48:00.001+04:002007-11-27T03:16:35.474+04:00

Note: We've updated our data set to include results from Vista with 2GB of RAM and also with Office 2003 instead of 2007. Check out our revised numbers here. With the initial performance characteristics of Windows Vista leaving much to be desired (see our previous post on the subject), many IT organizations have put off deploying the new OS until the first service pack (SP1) is released by

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com113tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-1832757728055407982007-11-15T19:23:00.000+04:002007-11-15T19:33:13.261+04:00

“What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.” Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (“Wintel”) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com66tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-54892578310076448212007-09-22T10:54:00.000+04:002007-09-22T10:59:38.500+04:00

One of the unexpected side effects of moving from Virtual PC 2007 to Virtual Server as development and testing environment is lower CPU utilization. For some reason, when I load up a test scenario (two client VMs collecting data and uploading to a single server VM) in Virtual PC 2007, the virtualpc32.exe process hosting the scenario chews-up 50% or more of the available CPU cycles on my dual-core

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-17107426461873724902007-06-22T19:03:00.000+04:002007-06-22T19:05:27.862+04:00

Everyone knows by now that Vista is slower than Windows XP. In fact, my own testing shows it to be roughly twice as slow on the same hardware (see our upcoming Test Center study for more details). That's because Vista is a far more complex operating system, with many additional features and background services that simply don't exist under XP.What many users don't know, however, is that this gap

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-63057801139510800792007-05-17T19:00:00.000+04:002007-06-22T19:03:40.683+04:00

Lately, there has been a rash of unscientific reporting around the issue of Windows Vista and notebook battery consumption. Some customers have apparently reported decreased battery life under Vista, however, most of these reports have been entirely anecdotal in nature: Someone quoting someone else who claims that some notebook has somehow lost some of its battery life under some version of Vista

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-33301777506457433382007-04-17T11:16:00.000+04:002007-04-17T11:18:35.185+04:00

As I watch Intel launch its latest quad-core CPU I can't help but wax nostalgic about my time as contract test engineer for the company's Desktop Architecture Labs (DAL). It was early 2000 and the first Pentium 4 was still in preproduction testing. I had just received my prototype system for evaluation - an 800Mhz box with dual-channel RAMBUS (remember those guys?) RDRAM. I knew they were in

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-87835024930296590122007-03-20T16:39:00.001+04:002007-03-20T16:51:10.341+04:00

Microsoft's new Aero Glass GUI - one of the cornerstones of the company's Windows Vista marketing message - is a joy to behold. Aero's sleek, semi-transparent facades serve to enhance the user experience by providng a stronger sense of "depth" and cohesion. Combined with Vista's enhanced UI metaphors (love those "breadcrumbs" in explorer), Aero is a major improvement over the XP GUI.It's also a

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-3743552683025770522007-03-10T11:08:00.000+04:002007-03-13T14:21:22.847+04:00

One of the more mysterious new features of Windows Vista is its SuperFetch memory management subsystem. Billed as a "smart" pre-caching mechanism, SuperFetch is supposed to improve system responsiveness by monitoring application usage patterns and then pre-loading application code in anticipation of the next task. SuperFetch uses the time of day and other behavioral markers to determine what to

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-16332280365334987652007-03-09T11:14:00.000+04:002007-03-10T11:16:14.331+04:00

Everyone knows that Microsoft Office is a bit of a memory hog. In fact, few products can claim as much credit for driving the memory upgrade cycle as the ubiquitous combination of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. However, while many power users may think they’ve pushed the envelope on one or more of these applications – massive documents, huge spreadsheets, media-rich presentations – none can

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1285849328344730084.post-57396155006021657022007-02-21T02:35:00.000+04:002007-02-20T14:45:28.537+04:00

Today I installed “DreamScene” – and kissed my CPU cycles goodbye. The official marketing moniker for Microsoft’s seductively frivolous new “motion desktop” technology (one of those Ultimate Extras we’ve been promised since Vista was RTM), DreamScene transforms Windows’ staid desktop wallpaper mechanism into a seamless, animated backdrop to your workaday tasks. And like much of the Vista Aero

Research Staffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688739704799598919noreply@blogger.com1