Compare vista vs xp

With this latest transition, however, many people have been asking whether it really is worth the trouble to upgrade. To answer that question, here's a head- to-head comparison between the current incumbent, Windows XP , and the newly arrived successor, Windows Vista. You may be wondering, why make this comparison now?

With the recent release of Service Pack 1 for Vista, the new Windows has more or less settled into its permanent form, giving us a chance to realistically compare the two systems on their own merits. Comparing Vista to XP in the first months of its release was not a valid measure of their relative merits, as many issues not under MS's control were causing Vista to misbehave.

Now though, issues relating to driver support, third-party vendor foul-ups, and other such teething issues have been mostly resolved.

For clarity's sake, this comparison will be broken up by topic, covering each of the major functions that a modern operating system is expected to fulfill.

Following that, there will be a list of any miscellaneous issues for each OS that weren't covered in the general overview. So, let's crack open the crypt, and see what shambling horrors emerge! One of the first things people notice about an operating system is how it presents itself. As much as people might like to say they don't care, appearance does effect our perception of how a system works. More than just graphical style though, look and feel is also about the responsiveness of the system.

You may well find yourself somewhere between these two extremes, though, and so the 'best' OS to use will be a more difficult decision. But don't worry — help is at hand. We've taken a test PC and laptop, installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 on them and applied a number of testing real-life benchmarks to see which will come out on top.

We're aware that speed isn't everything, though, so we've also explored the new features that each OS has introduced. To make life easy for you, we've split our findings over eight categories, with an overall verdict at the end. It's often said that recent versions of Windows have become bloated, and it's hardly unreasonable to expect each new OS to perform better than its previous iteration. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the lightweight OS runs quickly on today's processors.

Newer OSes can optimise for modern hardware and include more powerful features, but is this extra functionality really just slowing us down? To find out, we decided to test each operating system's performance on an average PC.

We installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 in that order all bit versions on the machine's GB hard drive and ran a number of real-world benchmarks to find out which OS was best. XP was heralded as reliable and user friendly. By the time, Vista was launched, majority of the public was used to XP, and some were even hesitant to switch to Vista. Even though the number of Vista users surpassed Microsoft expectations, they did not surpass the number of XP users.

Most people prefer XP, over Vista, claiming that is it much more user friendly and efficient that Vista. They also criticize Vista for have additional hardware requirements that XP. The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks i. The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed. With dual and quad core processors being so popular, this test is also a fairly important one I think.

The ability of the cores to process data blocks and pass them to another core for processing producer-consumer paradigm of different sizes and different chain sizes is measured. Windows 7 takes it here, but not by much. Oddly we see Vista with a much lower latency than the other two operating systems. To me, it looks as though Windows Xp is still the best choice for an operating system.

Sure the others look nicer, but in terms of performance I think Xp is the one to go with on average. Yes Vista and 7 have DirectX 10, but how much of a difference does that really make? Maybe I could turn Aero off and see what kind of results I get then? Pingback: links for « doug — off the record.