Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows
Home > Type > News > Report: Vista on par with XP performance; SP1 is faster

Report: Vista on par with XP performance; SP1 is faster

Feb. 28, 2008 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

Microsoft commissioned Principled Technologies to help them silence the complaints about Vista performance. Principled Technologies complied:

We have produced the following currently publicly available report for Microsoft Corp.

Responsiveness of Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP on common home tasks We measured the responsiveness of three operating systems—Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP, when performing a set of common home tasks after rebooting, returning from standby, and in ongoing operation. We tested five systems: Dell XPS 600 (desktop), Dell XPS M170 (notebook), HP a1320y (desktop), HP d4100e (desktop), and Toshiba Tecra M4 (tablet).

Responsiveness of Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP on common office tasks We measured the responsiveness of three operating systems—Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP, when performing a set of common office tasks after rebooting, returning from standby, and in ongoing operation. We tested five systems: Dell XPS 600 (desktop), Dell XPS M170 (notebook), HP a1320y (desktop), HP d4100e (desktop), and Toshiba Tecra M4 (tablet).

Responsiveness of Windows Vista and Windows XP on common home tasks (2007) We measured the responsiveness of two operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows XP, when performing a set of common home tasks after rebooting, returning from standby, and in ongoing operation. We tested five systems: Dell XPS 600 (desktop), Dell XPS M170 (notebook), HP a1320y (desktop), HP d4100e (desktop), and Toshiba Tecra M4 (tablet).

The impact of switching from Windows XP to Windows Vista on common business task efficiency (2007) We explored the response time a typical business user would experience during real-world work scenarios on Windows Vista and Windows XP. We measured responsiveness on a range of systems after rebooting, returning from standby, and in ongoing operation.

My take on this? Performance benchmarks are bogus, and new OSes are always slower than their predecessors on the same hardware. So what? In day to day use, I find Vista's performance to be just fine, thank you very much, and I'd never consider going back to an older OS for some perceived but largely illusionary performance bump. Vista offers better security and functionality than XP, and there's just no turning back.

In any event, if you download the above linked reports (the first two are new while the next two are from last year), you'll discover, surprise surprise, that "overall, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP performed comparably on most test operations [but] Windows Vista SP1 was notably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP on several common home operations." This was true for both common home and business tasks.

Gentlemen, start your complaining. :) 

Discuss this Article 22

daveinla
on Feb 28, 2008
Yeah who cares about a tenth of a second anyway ?? As long as the OS is more functional and more secure as Paul said... But the file copying thing was inexcusable. I wonder how SP1 compares now to XP in that respect.
joe-dokes
on Feb 28, 2008
What Paul fails to disclose is that a paradigm shift has taken place. In previous incarnations of both DOS and Windows it was EXPECTED that the next generation of MS's operating system would run slower on the same hardware than the previous generation. This incidentally was true for Mac system software as well, that is, until X. Now one could argue, and I think rightfully so, that 10.0 was a dog, and was in serious need of optimization. Thus, the big performance boost of 10.1 and much more moderate boosts of 10.2, .3, .4, and .5 was due to serious optimization of the code. Yet, it also had the impact of changing the way not just mac users thought about operating systems but all computer users thought about operating systems. Thus, people who buy a computer and later upgrade the OS expect it to remain as responsive as it was with the previous OS. So Paul, you can say, "new OSes are always slower than their predecessors on the same hardware." yet, many people will say, "Not on a Mac." In effect the bar has risen. This is yet another example of how Apple while being "fart in the wind" in terms of market share according to people like weedmonk, continue to lead the overall computer market. Regards Joe Dokes
Sir_timbit01
on Feb 28, 2008
Interesting. So where's the disconnect from the above tests and those done in the trade mags and online? Aside from people like us griping about Vista's performance, the trade magazines do so as well. I've noticed PC Magazine of all places has been very critical of Vista, and the most recent issue of Maximum PC says there is, overall, a 10% performance drop when comparing Vista side-by-side to XP. Mac readers certainly aren't their primary audience. To be fair, when XP was released, there were a whole slew of articles released on improving its performance vis a vis Win2000. Vista has a lot more services running to give you added functionality, but that functionality is going to cost you. SO I guess it depends on what you're doing. Would you notice a 10% difference running Word or surfing the net? Probably not. But I suspect a lot of gamers do, and the consensus out there is that Vista's video drivers (SLI configs in particular) aren't quite as optimized as they are under XP. Yeah I know SP1 should fix that soon but still, people are comparing Vista by how it's been in the year since it's been released, which is pre-Sp1. And I agree about the file copying. That's improved with SP1, but I've read elsewhere (news.com?) that USB file copying actually dropped in performance with SP1, while network copying improved. Still, I will be happy to see SP1 released. I will eventually build a new PC to replace my old dead tower, but will wait a while yet as I'm still debating Vista32 or 64.
JamesNT
on Feb 28, 2008
Joe, I couldn't disagree with you more. Do you think there are tons of people out there who do operating system design? No. Just like with Boeing and Airbus, the number of operating systems engineers is small. The same guys who now work at Apple have probably worked at MS and the other way around. Also, Apple has a few advantages over Vista - such as backwards compatiblity. Vista has tons upon tons of devices and applications that it MUST remain compatible with. Apple, on the other hand, throws out back compat like yesterday's news paper. The Apple OS is optimized but only for ONE set of hardware whereas Windows must run on many thousands upon thousands of hardware configurations. It's easy to be fast when you only have one thing do to. In short, Windows has a much steeper hill to climb than your precious OSX does and I think Windows climbs that hill very well. Before you brag about those advantages I listed earlier, don't forget that they do come at a cost - far less market share. JamesNT
daveinla
on Feb 28, 2008
"Vista has tons upon tons of devices and applications that it MUST remain compatible with. Apple, on the other hand, throws out back compat like yesterday's news paper. The Apple OS is optimized but only for ONE set of hardware whereas Windows must run on many thousands upon thousands of hardware configurations. It's easy to be fast when you only have one thing do to." That is actually untrue. While it's true that MS has a much harder task at trying to make all these hardware function properly, the mac platform has also quite a lot of different hardware to support. A 6 yr old Mac with PowerPC will still perform well in Leopard without hardware compat problems. Apple has used quite a few chipset and GPU in their PowerPC Macs as well as in their X86 Macs now also.
boolean22
on Feb 28, 2008
I've got to argue here that at my office, people are annoyed by the installation of TIGER on G4 hardware, thus refuting the compatibility thingy. The Paul's statement should be read backwards. «A new OS will/should ALWAYS perform faster on newer hardware» That said, I found Vista solved an issue that I loathed on every other Windows and Linux environment: window redraw. I hate XP whenever you move a window that has a pending process, it stalls the GDI/Directdraw component in such way that the window contents starts to replicate all over the place. Bleeding and tearing hearing and there NO LONGER WITH VISTA. People thinks that Aero is just a pretty face, but I found it to be an improved reliability component, when properly configured.
jvd897
on Feb 28, 2008
@joe-dokes: It depends on what one considers a new operating system. I think the kind Paul means is XP vs. Vista, or OS 9 vs. OS X. With that in mind, SP1 should have as much of a performance boost over Vista RTM as 10.1 did over OS X 10.0. And it looks like that will indeed happen.
drylight
on Feb 28, 2008
" Performance benchmarks are bogus, and new OSes are always slower than their predecessors on the same hardware." This is bogus. OS X has been faster through a few of its updates. And yes, noticeably faster. You should qualify that by saying Windows, or at least Vista.
drylight
on Feb 28, 2008
What?! No comment on how this is a report Microsoft paid for? Truly lame to backup a report that Microsoft paid to have done to quiet the discourse from people complaining about the crappy Vista performance.
ibarskiy
on Feb 28, 2008
drylight, you disqualify yourself by your last post that indicates severe comprehension issues. Re-read the introductory statement by Paul that addresses your concern. JamesNT: don't bother. They would get offended if you called them mac fanboys, but you can't convince them with rational arguments all the same.
Waethorn
on Feb 28, 2008
"Thus, the big performance boost of 10.1 and much more moderate boosts of 10.2, .3, .4, and .5 was due to serious optimization of the code." "A 6 yr old Mac with PowerPC will still perform well in Leopard" oh puh-leeze! a 6 year old Mac shipped with 512MB of RAM at most, and even Apple says that Leopard works optimally with 2GB. multitasking on Leopard with a PowerPC is dog slow - i know cuz i tried opening multiple Mac apps on a used one in a computer store one day, and they had to turn it on first (none of the others even were turned on). 10.5 is optimized for Intel-based Mac's. you can't even compare that to anything prior to Tiger, cuz they didn't even have Intel Mac's back then. OSX was a complete pig until 10.2, but ever since then, it's required a heftier and heftier system for its bundled apps and services. "Apple has used quite a few chipset and GPU in their PowerPC Macs" no they didn't!! They had literally only a handful of systems that offered discrete graphics processors, and most were high-priced systems. The rest used proprietary integrated graphics chips that only Apple utilized. ""new OSes are always slower than their predecessors on the same hardware." yet, many people will say, "Not on a Mac." " then i guess this guy's pants are on fire too, eh?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0i3Ccr_M_w Here's a translation of the writeup: "Lately I noticed that my MacBook wasn't starting up properly, or at least as fast as one would like. When I would start my MacBook with Tiger, it would fly - it was incredible. Before upgrading it to 4gb of ram, I had recorded a video, that I posted a month and a half ago. The results were practically identical, but it was even slower with 4gb. The RAM I bought from OWC (?) was 4gb DDR2 667." Comment 1: "It's the truth. Leopard is slower compared to Tiger." Comment 2: "wow! ya think!?"
DRWAM
on Feb 28, 2008
I found Leopard faster than Tiger on my 3GHz quad Pro Tower and my G4 that I bought in 1999. But I admit that I have 1 GB RAM in the old G4 as wll as a CPU upgrade [it had a 450MHz G4 CPU and I replaced it with a 1.25 GHz G4 from OWC. My friends have the same experience with those [girlie] iMac thingies. I know cuz I did their upgrades for them. Vista also runs well on the Pro Tower, with fast install and setup. OMG this setup is lovely. The funny thing is that most of the group has been waiting to buy a new computer, until they found out that all of our software works on Vista, and they now know that it all works because I installed it on the Mac. And I installed it on the Mac because of many of you [mostly Paul] proclaiming how good Vista was. So, you can all pat yourselves on the back, but we won't be paying you for the consultation. Still some of my group members may buy a Mac and use it for daily needs, but also install Vista to run all [actually just one] Windows app. So thanks guys. I owe you all a beer.
DRWAM
on Feb 28, 2008
Shoot! I was way off topic, so here it is: If you buy a $300 computer, Vista is slow. If you buy a $1000 computer, Vista is fast. If you buy a $3000 computer, Vista is very fast. Now exchange the word Mac for Vista [but delete the $300 level since it does not exist]. Nuf said!
Waethorn
on Feb 28, 2008
"I owe you all a beer." you owe me 2 - buy a PC with 4GB of RAM, and install Vista x64 so you can use it all.
DRWAM
on Feb 28, 2008
Yep Dr. Waethorn, I will definitely do it. Thanks, Doc
Waethorn
on Feb 28, 2008
actually, you owe me 3 - make sure it's a desktop PC with a 965 or "3-series" (P35/G35, etc.) chipset and you can install up to 8GB of RAM on most motherboards. ;)
daveinla
on Feb 29, 2008
Weatherhorn: "oh puh-leeze! a 6 year old Mac shipped with 512MB of RAM at most" you're right but none of my friends who use old G4 powerbooks still have the stock 512 MB... everybody sticks at least 1Gb of RAM these days in their laptops. I use a macmini G4 1.5 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM as my media center. It runs 24/7 and whenever I open activity monitor on it i still have free memory left... That's because I use mainly 2 apps on that machine: VNC and Frontrow. And that machine is as snappy as my Macbook with dual intel proc. Leopard runs just fine with 512MB of RAM as long as you don't use more than 4 big apps at the same time. 1GB is more than enough for a power-user like me. The reason the G4 feels very snappy in OSX is because they have a great vector processing unit (Altivec) which OSX make extensive use for GUI drawing and effects. It's at least as good as SSE3. I have 2Gb installed in my Macbook and whenever I open activity monitor, I have roughly 1 GB free memory... which is virtually useless. 2 GB is crazy plenty on OSX. 1 GB is more than enough (for a standard power-user). So you're wrong, sorry but OSX is heavily optimized for Altivec and PowerPC... ""Apple has used quite a few chipset and GPU in their PowerPC Macs" no they didn't!! They had literally only a handful of systems that offered discrete graphics processors, and most were high-priced systems. The rest used proprietary integrated graphics chips that only Apple utilized." The biggest bullshit I've ever read today on the net... You apparently don't know s*** about pre-X86 Macs... Yo mix up everything man. Apple used proprietary chipsets in their PowerPC Macs that differed in their bus speed and type of RAM support. All PowerPC Macs right from the 1st one I owned (a PPC 603 Performa) had standard ATI video chips... I can believe how some ignorant people can sometimes pretend to make smart comments... ridiculous Lastly your example is totally stupid. Anybody can encounter a one day a faulty OS. Had he popped is DVD and put a fresh 10.5 system it would have been just as fine as his Tiger reinstall. ridiculous. Anyway that whole argument is irrelevant as both MS and Apple have to support the same array of chipsets (beside AMD granted), GPU, Wifi chips, ethernet, printers, USB... And I think Apple does a better job at delivering x.0 versions that have properly written drivers. And lastly, I think that Leopard is the first Apple OS that don't offer specific performance increase for the average user. They reached a plateau with Tiger which is a very well optimized OS. The optimization in Leopard went for power user who need 64 bits for heavy memory use and heavy digital processing.
daveinla
on Feb 29, 2008
Weatherhorn, now you owe me at lest 2 beers for all the mistakes in your past post... ;-P Cheers !
DRWAM
on Feb 29, 2008
I think that we all should have a beer or ten together, then a big hug. Anyway, I will be ready for a new monster machine in September as I get a huge write-off when purchased every two years. That's why I buy high end towers [or build]. So Dr. Waethorn, we will consult at that time. Thanks, Doc
Waethorn
on Feb 29, 2008
"And that machine is as snappy as my Macbook with dual intel proc." either you're lying, or OSX is a bigger PoS than I previously thought. either way....meh!
lilserenity
on Feb 29, 2008
Bottom line is, if someone's happy with how their computer works, then who cares? I personally found Tiger to be slower on a PowerMac G4 Digital Audio that I ran it on than Panther was. (A 1.42GHz G4, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9800Pro etc., a very nice machine.) As long as you're happy, smile, and enjoy your computer--you have nothing at all to prove to me :) I know for example that my beat old Dell P4 2.4GHz is a bit slow at times but for the most part it nips around and I am happy with it, more than and nothing any one tries to say to the contrary of my current working experience will change that. If I put Vista on, I would not expect a 7 year old PC to run as smoothly as a new one. If Vista is now running better post SP1, hurrah! If Leopard is still working great on older Macs, hurrah! If Linux has managed to boot without setting your screen to 640x480 and everything is configured in the live cd, hurrah! Enjoy your computer is all I say.
subzerohitman721
on Mar 4, 2008
I'm glad to hear such positive comments about SP1. I am eagerly waiting to upgrade my system when it becomes available. I just hope that Microsoft takes all these lessions from Vista and executes them on Windows Seven. Seven better be running at warp speeds and not quite the impulse speeds of Vista. I am overall very satisfied with Vista. To me, it was no more difficult than using 2000 or XP. Its the same growing pains that users forget in our ADD society.

Please or Register to post comments.

Related Articles

IT/Dev Connections

Las Vegas
September 30th - October 4th

Paul ThurottYou'll have the opportunity to experience:
• 120 Technical
Sessions
• Networking with Peers
• Expert Speakers


Come See Paul Thurrott & Mary Jo Foley in Person!

Register Now

Office 365 InfoCenter

Get the latest insight and info from Paul

Read Now!

What I Use
Apr. 18, 2013
Article

What I Use: On the Road 21

Every so often, I publish an updated version of my “What I Use” document, which details the technology products and services I actually use day-to-day. Since I’m currently on my third business trip in five weeks, this is perhaps an ideal time to discuss the technology products I rely on when I travel and a few related points....More
Mar. 6, 2013
Article

What I Use: March 2013 33

Lots of changes since November, including a new PC-based home server running Windows 8, several new smart phones, new PCs and tablets, new cloud backup, Office 365 Home Premium and a nice doubling of my Internet speeds courtesy of Verizon FIOS....More
WinSuperSite.com
Related Penton Sites
Copyright © 2013 Penton Media, Inc