Another take on Vista vs. XP benchmarks
section: windows, for your questions: KezNews forum, 20.2.2008
As anyone who’s ever worked in a PC performance lab knows, the #1 rule of benchmarking is: Your mileage may vary.
I remembered that rule when I read my colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes’ epic account of his benchmark tests of Windows Vista SP1 versus Windows XP SP2 (Part 1 and Part 2). The first thing that struck me was how far apart his numbers were from those I was getting. In fact, I went back and redid all my tests to confirm that I hadn’t missed anything along the way. They checked out completely. On my test bed, with only one exception, Vista SP1 was consistently as fast as or faster than XP SP2, a result markedly at odds with Adrian’s findings.
I have no doubt that Adrian’s tests and timings were accurate, just as mine were. So what’s the difference?
For starters, our test beds were very different:
* Adrian chose a desktop system with a first-generation Intel dual-core processor, the 3.4 GHz Pentium 950D. I chose a Dell Inspiron 6400 notebook with an Intel T2050 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. (I bought this system in December 2006, a few weeks after Vista was released to business customers. It originally came with XP SP2 installed on it, and I upgraded the system to Vista almost immediately.)
* I chose to use a dual-boot configuration, designing my tests carefully so that file copy operations with each OS were done between the same source and destination volumes to minimize the effects of disk geometry on performance. Adrian used separate hard drives for each OS and each file copy operation.
* I used a wireless 802.11g network connection. Adrian used wired Gigabit Ethernet connections.
* Neither of us performed any special optimizations to either configuration except to ensure that drives were defragmented.
For my test files, I chose the same two groups of files I had used in previous rounds of performance testing last year. The first consisted of two large ISO files, each containing the contents of a ready-to-burn DVD, with a total size of 4.2 GB. The second group is a collection of music files, just over 1 GB in size, consisting of 272 MP3 files in 16 folders.
As it turns out, the test bed I chose is one that matches nicely with a lot of real world business-class systems. Notebooks represent the majority of the PC market these days, and the 802.11g connection in this one is by far the most popular networking option on portable PCs. From a performance standpoint, it’s neither a speed demon nor a slug. More importantly, this system’s specs match those that Microsoft’s engineers had in mind when they reengineered the file copy engine with Vista RTM and then with SP1. As Mark Russinovich notes in his detailed description of these changes, copies over high-latency networks such as WLANs are especially likely to benefit from the changes in Vista.
I ran each test multiple times and took the average of at least three tests. The graphs shown here are normalized, with Windows XP SP2 set to 100 and the results for Vista SP1 and Vista RTM charted proportionally.
source:
blogs.zdnet.com
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Comments(8)
yawn!
lol, xp to slow.
wow...time for tomato soup...
this story is extracted from zdnet.com and is authored by ed bott who is a known vista
fanboy. this man was one of the few bloggers who received a free ferrarai laptop all
preloaded with vista a year ago to sing microsoft's praises. obviously anything this man
says should be taken with a grain of salt. microsoft clearly has this untalented,
uninspired hack in their backpocket. hey, it pays the bills right? anyone with any brains
who researches why vista even exists will discover that even the development process of
this os was a nightmarish escapade of gigantic proportions. no vista for me.
vista finally wins a filecopy benchmark. wow, is that all...
still trying to use
limited scope to prove vista? this story is worthless.
i don't care what test say. when ever i use that pretty os it just seems so dang slow.
and when i jump on xp it is zippier.
i don't know about you guys, but i've had two laptops since vista came out. the first
was an acer aspire 5102wmli. it had 1.6ghz amd dual core, 1gb ram, 4200rpm pata hdd, and
ati radeon x1100 integrated graphics. it came with xp mce, and as soon as vista went rtm i
dual booted between xp mce and vista ultimate. visa was much faster in general. i didn't
run benchmarks between the two or anything like that, but just from the everyday tasks i
do to editing pictures in photoshop, everything was faster in vista. the only reason i
kept xp was the incompatibilities with programs and hardware when vista was first released
(which i blame on other companies, not microsoft). oh, yea and i was running vista x64. i
won't even get into how much i love vista on my current laptop.
i work in it
and help a lot of people running macs and i hate them. they are a pain to do anything and
they are slow as heck. and i'm not talking about ones that are a few years old i'm
talking about ones people just bought that they need help with.
like i said, i
haven't run benchmarks or done actual testing, but from my experience, vista is much
faster and a lot easier to use. please don't flame me, i'm just telling you guys my
personal opinion i'm not trying to tell anyone they are right or wrong. thanks.
i service computers in the real world. as tech for third party warranity providers and as
an indepentant tech. i work on everything from emachines to the fastest dell and hp's.
with the exception of a few new customers that are running all the new programs i have
replaced vista with xp on so many machines you would probably not believe it. the
biggest reason is, first and formaost ease of use and secondly speed. to people that use
thier computers and don't play with them, run speed test, and constantly fool with
them.....and you all know who you are....xp is the system to actually use....gt
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Vista vs XP
By bored on 21.02.2008 - 06:02