It’s often a lot of fun to push things to the limits, and that’s one reason a year and a half ago we installed 200 extensions in Firefox to see how well it would perform. Needless to say Firefox became a little sluggish, and there was very little viewable space since the toolbars occupied a large portion of the screen.
Well, what about putting the entire operating system to the test? Some crazy people decided to do just that. It started with a Mac OS X user who decided to open 150 applications simultaneously on his 2.2GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM. I’m not sure if Expose or the Dock was made for handling this many simultaneous apps, but they still worked:
(Click to Enlarge)
Of course a Windows user would have to come back with their own stress test, and one Gizmodo reader didn’t disappoint with his Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz) with 4GB of RAM. He has a video of Vista running 108 applications which were supposedly eating up a mere 30% of his processor. Then after opening the 108 programs he got bored and gave up. Gizmodo has a video of the desktop in action, which really shows off how well Vista’s Flip3D performs.
What amazes me is that these people had that many applications to run! I think there are about 30 or maybe 40 different programs on my computer, and I wouldn’t be able to stand the additional clutter that 100+ apps would create.
Ryan:
Do you have any information on Windows XP? I’m curious to see how it compares with Windows Vista.
Regards,
Omar.-
well i guess Vista is very solid OS more than OSX and XP and so.. it’s really stable OS .. although a lot of people out there hates it.. but the truth is it’s really rock solid.
Hmm.. according to SUMo there are 147 applications on my PC. I suppose I could do the same test in XP
I only have 2GB of RAM though, so I’m sure it’ll become sluggish quite fast.
Nope, it doesn’t look like anyone has given this a whirl with XP yet. Give it a week… I’m sure it will come.
I do agree that it’s pretty solid, but XP’s performance is pretty good itself. I’m sure it would come out about the same as Vista did.
Wow! You must install everything we write about.
Yeah, maybe you should stop writing about so many good software applications
I actually use all of the programs I have installed. I regularly do some cleaning and uninstall programs I really don’t use. Same goes for my 45 extensions, but that’s another story 
Vista premium sp1 on my laptop, XP sp2 on my desktop, both are robust and support to be somewhat shaked, with appropriate hardware, ram almost for vista to display 3DAero without hurting all system performances. That’s the point where Microsoft should be more clear. Admitting Vista requirements are beyond what they pretend, even giving Vista requirements at their right values as soon as it was a public release, many people hating the OS for sure would not have this “a priori” judgement.
Amazing article today. Could XP with -let’s say- 1Go ram really be half that able to do?
Only 30 or 40!?! You should be booted out of Geekdom for even admitting that!
I don’t even know how many apps/utilities I have… but it has got to be more than 125!
Well, I only install the programs that I use a lot. It turns out that there are not that many I find useful enough to always install.
Can I please come back to Geekdom?
Cool, but it ends up being flame bait which kinds of ruins it.