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November 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Windows XP SP3 Widening the Gap vs. Vista
The folks over at the exo.performance.network (www.xpnet.com) have been at it again. This time they got their hands on Windows XP Service Pack 3 - something I've been trying to do for several weeks now - and ran it through their usual battery of tests. Here's the link to the results entry page on their blog site.
It's worth noting that, based on their analysis of both SP3 and Vista + SP1, the latter now looks to be more than 2x slower than the former. In other words, if you "upgrade" from XP w/SP3 to Vista w/SP1, you'll take a greater-than-2x performance hit.
That's a fairly damning conclusion. It also makes me wonder just how Microsoft will convince the fence-sitters to jump ship to Vista. Not only is its immediate predecessor, Windows XP, the faster OS for mainstream productivity tasks, it seems to be getting quicker by the minute. Microsoft should be doing everything in its power to narrow the gap between these competing offerings, not widening it by boosting the performance of their "obsolete" version.
The xpnet.com folks close by posing the question: Is Vista = Windows ME "Reloaded?" I'm inclined to answer "yes." Vista is looking more and more like an unfortunate detour along the Windows development roadmap, one that I'm betting the Windows development team is wishing they could have avoided altogether.
Guys, I feel your pain...so...bring on Windows 7! :-)
Posted by Randall Kennedy on November 23, 2007 08:30 AM
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Randall,
You and the folks at xpnet do realize, don't you, that if Microsoft does anything to make Vista's speed comparable to XP's it will be to modify SP3 to slow XP down, not to speed up Vista? Maybe it would be better not to make too much of a fuss over the speed difference, lest XP users end up with a slower OS.
Posted by: P-Dog at November 26, 2007 05:46 AMP-Dog beat me to it. We should time how long it takes Microsoft to build an "emergency hotfix" to XP SP3 that slows it down so Vista doesn't seem horrible by comparison.
Posted by: Compugeek at November 26, 2007 01:23 PMTOP STORIES
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