Surprise, surprise - Windows XP SP3 runs faster than Vista SP1
By Triston McIntyre
I’m still not sure whether I should even classify this as news, per se, but take it as you will: if you’re sitting in front of an operating system-less PC, holding a copy of Vista SP1 in your right hand and a copy of XP SP3 in your left, and you can’t decide which OS to go with, your now barren PC will run better with XP SP3.
That’s according to a side by side test of both Microsoft operating systems by Computer Reseller News. The tests were conducted on two identical HP rp5700s, boasting respectable 160 Gb hard drives, 1.8 GHz processors, and 1 Gb of RAM each.
The tests, though not shocking, did provide a little insight into the strong points of each OS.
Let’s just jump right in, shall we? XP is faster on restart, doing so in a zippy 35 seconds, in comparison to Vista, which did so in 58 seconds.
For the next event, the testers examined which OS could copy files from a network drive to each computer’s hard drive; Vista took the prize, copying the 1.25 Gb file in 2:29, while XP finished the chore in 2:54.
Of course, when it came down to memory consumption and processor power, Vista started sucking wind. XP SP3 far outperformed Vista in this regard, but then again, the sky is blue and cows have been known to make “moo” noises.
For those of you who missed the memo, Bill Gates has announced that Windows 7 will be taking command of the helm, so to speak, come some time next year. If it were me, I would not waste even a second considering installing Vista over XP with the newer OS coming so soon.
This reminds me of the whole ME debacle so long ago; consider the way Microsoft pushed that mess under the rug, realize that Vista will also be under that same rug shortly, and enjoy the speed upgrades that are coming to XP with the soon-to-be-released SP3.
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April 7th, 2008
Why the hell is Microsoft discontinuing XP in two months (except for low end computers?). Discontinuing XP has to be one of biggest business blunders of all time, because there is nothing to replace XP with.
While MSFT lives in its ivy tower believing that Vista is ready for prime time. Another 9000 PC school computers in Switzerland are going to Ubuntu Linux, joining the 23,000 school computers in the Philippines that are going to Linux, along with all of Russia by 2010 going to Linux. And to add insult to the injury, according to a recent article Linux is up 61 %.
MSFT, its time to get your heads out of your hard drives and dump Vista, keep XP (in all flavors and in all configurations) for another three years or that “other geeky operating system” (Linux) will leave you in the dust at this rate.
April 7th, 2008
i think that windows 7 will be the service pack 2 for windows vista, becouse right now windows 7 looks like vista and it’s same code, only trying to get better the code. Becouse right now vista has a bad reputation and if they don’t fix it the people who buy vista will get angy. You know they pay a lot of money for the OS, and 2-3 years later they will have to pay another os. That’s not good.
Windows XP SP3. it’s better why, becouse it take less resources of the computer, no like vista that it take a lot of power and the true is. for running vista you need this requierments.
256 mg or video card.
2 gb or ram
processor speed of 2 nucleo running a 2 gh.
and this is the real minimun requierments.
April 7th, 2008
i think that windows 7 will be the service pack 2 for windows vista, becouse right now windows 7 looks like vista and it’s same code, only trying to get better the code. Becouse right now vista has a bad reputation and if they don’t fix it the people who buy vista will get angy. You know they pay a lot of money for the OS, and 2-3 years later they will have to pay another os. That’s not good.
Windows XP SP3. it’s better why, becouse it take less resources of the computer, no like vista that it take a lot of power and the true is. for running vista you need this requierments.
256 mg or video card.
2 gb or ram
processor speed of 2 nucleo running a 2 gh.
and this is the real minimun requierments.
April 8th, 2008
If you believe that Windows 7 will be available in 2009 you are truly naive. Either it will show up in 2011 with 70% of its promised features or it will show up in 2010 with 35%.
April 8th, 2008
Screw MS!
That said, I’d like to shove my copy of VISTA down Gates’ throat!
Linux and any other OS was done a great service by microsoft (no caps- that crappy company deserves lower case only) with their imaginary VISTA OS. To bad some other company can not take on ms with a system similar to XP, I’d love to see Gates and company go belly up, they’ve screwed the public around so much for years.
I will continue with XP until such time ms can actually make a better OS, then maybe I’ll give in and spend more money, or not, maybe I’ll check into obtaining a pirated copy since it makes not difference if you end up with crap either way. Seems ms if so driven by piracy and other issues they offer up a crappy OS that it’s basically usless.
I too feel Windows 7 will be just another crappy attempt to get vista workable, have I said crap before???
April 8th, 2008
Not a big Vista fan here, I think it is a waste of effort and offers no clear advantage over XP, a marketing blunder of epic proportions, and has done real harm to Microsoft.
However, to be fair the hardware used to test the 2 OS’s is heavily skewed for XP. 1 gig for Vista is like running Windows 98 and XP in 256 Meg of RAM. Which do you think is going to run faster?
All Os’s have a memory sweet spot where the memory is large enough to load enough of the kernel so disk swapping isn’t necessary. XP is more than good to go at 512 meg if all you’re doing is running Word or Web browsing. If you want to give Vista the same double optimum memory footprint, toss four gig in and run the tests.
One of the changes in Vista is it’s love of loading assloads of code into a RAM cache. That Vista needs 2 gig of memory to run decently is not a secret.
Nice analysis with the moo and sky blue comment, which is much easier I guess than examining the the test parameters and what, if anything, it proves.
It might prove that XP is faster than Vista or it might prove that running an OS with twice the resources for good performance, against an OS with half the resources for good performance proves nothing except Vista needs more RAM than XP.
I know that a blog isn’t meant to be journalism, but how about at least trying to look at the subject objectively and attempting to actually add something besides “Yeah, I think Microsoft is teh suck too. Check this out because it agrees with me.”
April 10th, 2008
I’m not a computer geek or IT person by any means, but I’m sick of hearing how xp runs faster than vista. OBVIOUSLY. xp was built over 5 years ago, and is built to work on older hardware. of course if you slap xp and vista on a 1.5gb, 1gig memory system, xp will outrun vista. holy crap thats not news.
i bet all you people said the same thing when xp came out. ” 1 gig of ram? are you crazy? this xp will never amount to anything”. and now you are saying the same for vista. i hope i’m not the one that has to say that hardware changes, software changes. get with the times people.
April 10th, 2008
Jack:
Xp runs modern hardware well. It ran on 256 meg, tolerably with the hardware and software of the time, and was touted by Microsoft to need 64 meg at launch. Xp had a slew of actually useful features with a firewall, system restore, built in wireless, automatic rollback when rogue applications replaced system files.
Vista offers no compelling features to embrace it over XP, unless you want to buy new hardware to run common tasks slower. Vista was the first Microsoft OS I uninstalled, and that was after being involved in the early betas and 90 days past the public release. It was OK, not terrible but the pain was much greater than the gain.
This is more like the disaster of Windows Millenium, a OS released as a stop gap between Win98se and the real advances of XP enduser friendly using the NT chassis for stability. It was universally panned and reviled as unstable compared to 98 with no discernible upside for most people, a money grab. If XP hadn’t come out for 4 years it would have been the same derisive ridicule as the current Vista reaction.
XP has lasted because it was a big leap forward over 98, and the underlying structure was flexible enough to embrace future hardware advantages. It is still the most stable OS Microsoft has. Vista, like ME was a rush to market, gutted of the most compelling features for expediency and the need for income.
Microsoft has to do a repeat of ME/XP, and Vista has shrunk the margin of error substantially.
April 11th, 2008
New operating systems are focused on adding functionality by taking advantage of increases in computer power.
Vista is by no means slow on modern hardware. By more objective methods of comparison Vista is far better than XP.
April 11th, 2008
Jack wrote:
“I’m not a computer geek or IT person by any means, but I’m sick of hearing how xp runs faster than vista. OBVIOUSLY. xp was built over 5 years ago, and is built to work on older hardware. of course if you slap xp and vista on a 1.5gb, 1gig memory system, xp will outrun vista. holy crap thats not news.”
BUT
1) XP runs faster than Vista on ANY machine. You could have made that 2GB RAM, 3GB RAM — whatever you want. XP still runs faster.
2) People kept saying “wait for the service pack”. They meant Vista SP1. But guess what? The XP team also produced a service pack! XP SP3 — and rather than Vista SP1 closing the gap with XP, XP’s service pack WIDENS the gap. Go XP team!
3) XP is not outdated. There are no programs or games that will only run on Vista. There are many that will not run on Vista, while ALL programs and games will run on XP. There are no peripheals (printers, scanners) that only work with Vista. There are many that do NOT work with Vista, while ALL work with XP. I have a scanner that I use several times a week — no Vista drivers available. Why dump a scanner just to make my computer run slower?
If I want “eye candy” there are several themes that give a Vista-like look to XP.
4) XP SP3 updates “security” to match Vista. (And no I don’t consider UAC to be security.)
So, XP is still very relevant while also boasting superior speed.
May 6th, 2008
“It might prove that XP is faster than Vista or it might prove that running an OS with twice the resources for good performance, against an OS with half the resources for good performance proves nothing except Vista needs more RAM than XP.”
One small problem with that analysis… Since Vista “needs more RAM than XP”, then it can be assumed (Backed by the facts, I might add) that Vista has a much, MUCH larger resource footprint than does Windows XP. So, for the sake of argument, lets say that Windows XP has a memory footprint of 256MB (A low estimate, in my opinion). Lets also give Vista a low estimate, say 512MB. This means that, no matter how much RAM is in the system, Windows XP will ALWAYS have more resources available for programs. Period.
As for my experiences with Vista? I have encountered numerous problems with combined XP/Vista networks, and software compatibility has been a HUGE issue with Vista users. Not to mention the exorbitant prices associated with Vista, which are quite possibly the highest prices ever associated with an OS, though I don’t know this for a fact.
All in all, I think the argument that Windows XP has significantly better performance than Vista has been proven time and time again.
Oh, and by the way, Tom’s Hardware performed similar tests using a Core 2 Extreme X6800 with 2GB DDR2-800 and an HIS Radeon X1900XTX with 512MB of GDDR3. Granted, the test was performed back in January of 2007, and Vista has since released SP1, but don’t forget that XP has just released SP3. The overall result? Vista was overall slower than XP, with some results being almost the same. However, I do admit that with this hardware configuration, the gap between the two is definitely narrower than the CRN comparison.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xp-vs-vista,1531.html
The question remains this, then: Since Vista has no better security, no better performance, no better features to speak of, and you have to have to run it on 2GB of RAM just to come CLOSE to Windows XP performance (Not to mention the lack of OpenGL support)…. Why would anyone prefer Vista over XP?
May 17th, 2008
because they think they are smarter with their bran spanking new cpus.
who gives a rats tell me then vista gurus can ye dual core 2gb machine boot from bios to desktop in 10 seconds like a 2.93 p4 northwood/512mb can with xp service pack too?heck youd be lucky if ye can beat that coming out of hibernation mode without ye glitches.
besides i like to access all my files(yes mine ,not theirs)i like to access all hidden folders in an event a parasite decides to reside,i like to know exactly where each and every folder lies within.
to acheive that with vista ye will need more than a dozen brains,no thanks i prefer the concept of personal pc,vista takes that priviledge away.