Update: Re-Testing Vista w/2GB RAM, Office 2003
link: original article - section: windows
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.
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 "whopping" 4% improvement in OfficeBench throughput.
Note: We added the Windows XP (SP3) results to the chart to add further context to the Vista results. As before, all tests were conducted on the same Dell XPS M1710 system w/2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and DDR-2 667MHz RAM.
A few members voiced their concerns over the use of Office 2007 under Vista. They suggested we re-test using Office 2003 on both Vista and Windows XP. Here are the results:
Analysis: Moving from Office 2007 to Office 2003 definitely improved Vista's showing. Instead of being over 2x slower than XP on the same OfficeBench workload, Vista is now "only" 1.8x slower.
To quote Darth Vader: "Impressive...most impressive."
