Meet the new PC OS performance champ: XP SP3

In a head to head benchmark comparison between the betas of XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) and Vista SP1 there is no competition.

XP SP3... what's the nice word for it? XP SP3 kicks Vista's backside. Up one side of the field and down the other.

http://www.news.com/Windows-XP-outshines-Vista-in-benchmarking-test/2100-1016_3-6220201.html?tag=newsmap

i think this is really the key statement.... i would define it further that DEVELOPERS arent ready for Vista yet. Even MS doesnt have 64bit applications yet ready to run native in Vista 64bit. i have acually noticed an increase in speed with the applications i work with most likely due to the more RAM i can access.... but im also pushing GB's of RAM access with applications where in XP they would peak out and run out of memory.

I just ordered all the components for a kick-ass quad core system and... Windows XP. The more I read about Vista, the less promising it sounds.

Where did that come from?

I don't think I need it though

It should probably be kept in mind (particularly in light of Alpha's post) that the test bed machine was not heavily RAMmed by today's standards -- and, of course, that these were a suite of business oriented apps that put different stresses on a machine than do audio and video NLE's.

But this should give an overall sense of the responsiveness and efficiency of the OS's in question.

XP SP-3? : Where did that come from?

It's still in Beta, as is SP1 for Vista.

My understanding of XP SP3 is that the main reason it was developed was to allow for more CD Keys/Activations since they are extending the lifecycle of XP. The speed increase they are reporting is with MS Office applications, and I'm not sure if this is a general improvement across the board.

Good points. We'll have to wait for some real geeks to test all this out -- the interest seems to be there in the Anandtech BB: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=34&threadid=2122926&enterthread=y

If you go back to when XP came out, you'd find exactly the same types of comments about it relative to whatever it was that came before it? Windows 98? I don't even remember because I went straight from OS/2 to NT and never used any of the DOS based versions of Windows. It happens every time a new version comes out, and 4 years from now people will be talking about how great Vista is relative to whatever the next major release is called.

I beg to differ on the extent of the comments (if not the nature) and -- especially -- on the reluctance to adopt the then-new XP OS.

XP had, IIRC, the fastest adoption rate of any MS OS upgrade before or since.

win2k which some claim is STILL faster than XP. of course i booted 3.1 on a 486 a few years back from a junked computer is {censored} it was WAY FASTER on a much lesser processor/ram setup than what was modern at the time.

only due to the consumer front which 98 was a poor OS compared to 2Kpro.... most 98 users were more than happy to get rid of it.

ultimate is more bloated than business edition as well, which is what was used on the test... i dont know if that hinders the test.

I just wish they'd add a mod that stops a CD/DVD drive freezing everything while it checks what's on the CD. :arg:

FWIW, I was very reluctant to let go of W98 (having suffered through from W3.0 onward -- I thought W95 finally brought a decent GUI to Windows and the late 95 cycle and early 98 fixes to W95 really brought W95 to a decent level of relative stability and moving finally to the official W98 was pretty slick -- the machine I built and put W98 on rand for four months without a system crash -- crazy stability in those days, it seemed to me.

I did a lot of research before I broke my own rule -- never jump to a whole new OS without a whole new machine under you. I ran MS's are-you-ready-for-XP utility to find just what on my (then) extrememely complex setup.

I doubled my RAM going into XP but that was it... and once I turned off XP's (somewhat limited and mostly really dorky) eye candy, I was pleased to find that, with the extra RAM, it very much appeared to run faster. Certainly, key apps booted much faster.

but you are comparing against consumer-ware 98 to XP [which is the first consumer level OS built on teh NT kernel from MS].... put it against 2Kpro.

Oh snap! It appears that the claims made yesterday were far from honest. It turns out that the benchmarking didn't compare the same versions of Office. Linky.

Regarding the speed debate; Yes, Vista is more bloated than XP. And XP is more bloated than 2000. And 2000 is more bloated than 98 and so on. You could probably install Windows 98 in about 3 minutes on a current PC system. But that

Looks Like every other major release of Win OS (post-16 bit era) works, while the other is wiggy:

Windows 95: Messed up everyone's Windows paradigm, but satisfactory

Windows 98: Okay, but kinda wiggy

Win98 SE: Pretty solid!

WinME: Worst Windows EVAR.

Win XP: Almost Seven Years Going Strong!

Windows Vista: Who has Windows Vista?

well 2k came off of Windows NT. 3.x>95>98 were another code base. it went NT>2k>XP>Vista running enterprise OS which finally made the consumer debut in XP.

fwiw, i SLAMMED vista today running two apps with MASSIVE files running RAM @ 95% both apps were @ 1.8GB RAM used each. do that on XP... i was working images in photoshop and layout in corel [illustrator cant do layouts this large] about 5'x18' [thats feet, not inches].

Wow! Working on your new CD liner? (Just kidding!)

the super-duper fold out

i guess i should have also said i have 4GB RAM which just isnt enough anymore i need to max it out at 8GB for this board so i can run AE and Nuendo all at the same time while i finish up this one job. in fact, i started this job in XP and it crapped out of memory.

Yeh, the NT/W2K/XP/Vista line is completely separate. Back during I guess the Win95 days, Chairman Bill hired a guy named Cutler, who had been a key designer of the OS for the Dec VAX, called VMS. He was looking to do an OS from scratch, and MS had plenty o' money, so he was hired and allowed to go off and do his thing. That resulted in the original NT, which was a completely separate code base from the DOS based products. It was really oriented towards servers at the time, and I believe it has a pretty strict micro-kernel type architecture. That, unfortunately at the time, made it kind of untenable as a consumer OS with all those graphics and media requirements, so that architecture was compromised to various degrees. A variation of the Windows 98 type interface was added to it to create XP.

Carious ancient Windowisms still permeate the system at a fairly fundamental level. But, under the hood, it's a pretty modern and powerful OS. These days, given the changes in the CPU and motherboards, they could probably afford to go back towards a more strict micro-kernel architecture and not suffer so much for it, but I'm not sure if they are doing that or not.

The number of selling points diminishes with each MS release, it seems to me. A flattening out of the improvement/innovation curve. And efficiency? The curve goes the wrong way on that issue.

Win3.1 brought the new world of true multitasking to the masses. Win98 brought what - more "integration" I guess you would call it? Win2000 brought nothing I can remember worth crowing about (I actually never used it)....XP did bring a significant increase in stability...now Vista is to bring greater "security", which is a sketchy concept by all accounts.

In fact, the curve seems to be more of a loop - the current releases, except for a lot of windowdressing, seem to be more along the lines of fixing problems the previous releases created rather than substantial innovation.

I suppose this is what they mean about computer technology being "mature" now. I'm very skeptical of that notion - seems to me that the business model has frozen due to monopoly, and innovation is just too expensive an item on the profit & loss statement.

nat whilk ii

im curious what you think they need to be innovative of with an OS... simply put, it should run 3rd party software and hardware and boot the core machine up. thats about it... basically with a GUI.

and win3.x brought the GUI, 95 refined that into a much better GUI which was implemented onto the neterprise OS of NT which later became 2000, which was the most stable OS at the time... XP on the consumer side took the enterprise kernel of the NT system and left DOS behind. so if you dont see anything worth crowing about with 2000, then you miss the point of it in XP. Vista brings 64bit architecture allowing for more addressable memory, that is a pretty significant improvement over 32bit OS's of the past. now its time for the developers to catch up.

computer technology is far from "mature" right now... there will be far more innovations of it where we will look back and XP/Vista/OSX and be like "how did we ever work like that?!?" much as looking back to command line interfaces prior to GUI's. think back, Xerox-PARC looked at the mouse/gui alan kay invented and was like "who would EVER need this?"... just goes to show you in 20 years how far things have come, and still have a LONG way to go.

Bill Gates has been preaching often that we arent even at the dawn of computer technology yet [i think Jobs is right there with him honestly].... i tend to think he is right when you see some of these other technologies emerging like multi-touch screens, infinite leveled page viewing, etc.

Someone said that Vista is the new ME, the real new OS will be the next one. On a strict marketing analysis point of view this seems quite plausible.