Do You Believe This

This company says that Windows XP is faster than Vista when working with Office not being a Vista user i can not comment.

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203975

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/706/62403560yv3.jpg http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/9021/55338697pf3.jpg

 

Not really tech support issue - moving to Interesting Website Links

 

But Vista is so pretty and has a lot of nice features that XP doesn't.
Besides more RAM is cheap. rolleyes

 

Unused ram serves no purpose, for anything.

I much rather have Vista pre-caching applications with my unused ram, than simply letting it sit unused like XP does.

Of course, I don't buy cars to look at, either. I buy them to drive.

But hey, to each their own.

I guess another way to look at this, is launching app speed, etc. is not the only factor in speed.

If I can search faster, or get a task done faster, or have a feature that makes my life easier, then in those instances....Vista is faster.

Raw numbers mean little vs. real world use.

Comparing something that is 6 years old vs. new software tech isn't fair, either. Of course older software crap is faster, but in the end, its still older crap. People who want newer need to pay the price for the hardware capable of performing.

Linux of yesteryear is crap compared to now. Of course, Linux of today will generally not run on a computer that was a blue light special 6 years ago either. Not without losing features, or being limited on what distros you can run. Yet people expect Vista to run on their Pentium IIIs like a champ.

rolleyes

 

There really isnt more to it.

Every OS version has changes to it, and will continue to do things differently. Lets review some history.

Windows XP is faster than Windows Vista.
Windows 2000 is faster than Windows XP.
Windows NT is faster than Windows 2000.
Windows 98 is faster than Windows ME.
Windows 95 is faster than Windows 98.
Windows 3.1 is faster than Windows 95.

I see a pattern emerging. I wish I still had the URL, but Halo linked me an old article regarding XP after 6 months, and it was like looking at a Vista article now. Comparing XP to previous OSes, how it was slower, application compatibility was an issue....yada, yada.

 

Real world computing is not reflected in benchmarking. It goes back to the whole thing where people play games, or they benchmark.
I am concerned with how well it works when I use it, not when I test it.

Office 2007 runs as fast as Office 2003 on my machine. I am content with it, and care not what some generic test showed.


Discuss.

 

Business upgrade cycle is an entirely different beast. You will not see businesses upgrading until they have to, usually. There are many businesses still on Windows 2000. There is a difference between personal choice and financial decisions...

There is a reason why I diss benchmarks. Here is why.

What is running on the laptop in Vista, vs. XP? I know my Vista machine ran like poop from all the garbage the OEM loaded. Removing that, and its very, very fast.

What were the fragmentation rates on the drive for each OS? That makes a difference on access time, as well.

There are a bunch of these little factors that can and will sway the outcome of a benchmark. Thats why I will never trust them.

 

This is the old Vista vs. XP thing.......
Reviews only mean something to me before I buy a product. Once I have the product, the reviews go out the window as I put whatever I bought through it's paces. I have bought things that had nominal reviews but turned out to far exceed what was in the review.
I was leery of getting Vista. I had heard all the horror stories. I found them untrue for me. Vista has many nice add-ons, runs my system faster than the XP that I have in a dual-boot partition, is easy to configure and repair (if needed), and it is still an infant, but will get better as it matures.

 

I felt the same way when XP was released vs. 2000.

At any rate--its not MS'es fault that apps are still written to use GDI...which btw, isnt even used for the Classic theme in Vista, hence no hardware acceleration when turning Aero off...


The whole argument is akin to Rosetta on OS X.


My thought on the whole Office using GDI thing is like Rosetta and PPC apps. Its only there because of backwards compatibility. If it was a Vista only app--No GDI. IMO, the right answer is what Apple and third party software companies do:

Universal binaries. They install the version appropriate to the OS and hardware.

Alas, will this happen? Doubt it. Software devs are a lazy bunch (usually), and MS probably wont do it on their own apps either.