One user over at the Futuremark forum decided to do an unofficial speed comparison of Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2, and in the end he was pleasantly surprised by Vista’s performance. Here’s a rundown on some of the results:
- File extraction (extracting 3.9GB RAR with WinRAR)
- Vista: 2min 16sec
- XP: 2min 22sec
- Program load times
- Vista:
Photoshop CS3: 2 secs
OpenOffice: 1.5 secs
Crysis: 26 secs - XP:
Photoshop CS3: 8.5 secs
OpenOffice: 6.5 secs
Crysis: 33 secs - Crysis GPU-test (1280×1024)
- Vista (”High”, DX10, 64-bit): 35fps
- Vista (”High”, DX9, 64-bit): 37fps
- Vista (”High”, DX10, 32-bit): 35fps
- Vista (”High”, DX9, 32-bit): 36fps
- XP (”High”): 39fps
He did more tests, but I summed up the most important ones. Generally Vista took home the crown, except in the gaming arena. When it came to computer games, such as Crysis, Vista was no match for what XP had to offer.
He concluded his results with a chart of what a difference having SuperFetch enabled in Vista makes. As many of you know Vista uses a new technology called SuperFetch to store your most used programs and data into memory when your computer starts up. I’ve had several people ask how they can disable the feature, but maybe these startup times (in seconds) will make you think otherwise:
–Facts from Microsoft–
Bill Gates announced back in January that there are over 100 million copies of Vista on computers that are being used around the world, and that’s a pretty big milestone for the young operating system. Over the last year Microsoft has been able to collect some significant stats in hopes of persuading more users to make the upgrade to Vista, many of which were collected from participants of the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program. Here’s an overview of their findings:
- Majority of Windows Vista-based PCs boot in less than a minute.
- Majority of all Windows Vista-based PCs resume from sleep in less than 6 seconds.
- Windows ReadyBoost is a terrific new innovation in Windows Vista that lets you speed up your system in seconds, and PCs running Windows Vista that are equipped with 512 MB memory experience a performance boost of up to 40 percent.
- Windows Vista users generally experience 20 percent fewer application “hangs” than those running Windows XP.
- Based on their first 180 days of availability, Windows Vista has been shown to have fewer vulnerabilities than Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.4.
- Windows Vista security has improved so much that PCs running it are 60 percent less likely to be infected with viruses, worms, and rootkits than PCs running Windows XP SP2.
- And Windows Vista-based PCs are over 90 percent less likely to be infected than systems running Windows XP without a Service Pack.
- Windows Vista-based PCs are almost three times less likely to be infected with potentially unwanted software than Windows XP-based PCs because of Vista shipping with Windows Defender.
- Internet Explorer 7 is now blocking nearly 1 million attempts to access these fake sites per week. New phishing attacks are more than 25 times as common as new viruses. That’s right, over 20,000 of these fake websites are created every month.
Out of all those stats I would have to say that the most impressive is the one about phishing protection in Internet Explorer 7. I would have never guessed that it protects a million attempts to access phishing sites every week, and I’m glad that I’ve upgraded all of the “computer illiterate” people I know to that version. Because they are likely the ones who would fall for the scams.
I dunno why anyone would want to disable the superfetch thing. It DRASTICALLY speeds things up, as that chart says….but I’ve definitely noticed a difference.
Sucks about the Gaming, seeing as Unreal Tournament 3 is shipping to me on Tuesday. I heard Vista eats up more of your RAM which sucks! Does any 1 know why?
I’d like to see comparisons with SP3 on XP. I’ve read that it speeds things up a bit, as well. It is great to see Vista has lower loading times, but I’d prefer to stay away from the Windows ME of 2008.
Vista has HUGE performance problems accessing shared folders on a network, at least with server 2k3, in my experience. Literally 10 times slower in my experience as a system administrator. Lack of device drivers and application incompatibility should be mentioned, too, when considering Vista.
I personally love Vista. I have had ALOT less problems with Vista than with XP. I personally do not have performance OR compatibility problems. I suppose it depends on what you use it for??
Give Vista a chance people. It’s a great Operating System, especially once you tweak it a bit. (which you have to do with EVERY Windows operating system anyway)
muledoggie, what version of Vista were you using??? I tried Vista Home Premium last year because the boss bought a laptop and brought it in. On that system I can state network access to an SBS2003 server was quite slow. However with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate which has proper network access built in and can join the domain I suspect the speed would have been better. I to manage a network; so if you can provide feedback on that it would be great.
I disabled superfetch. So glad I did. It’s a personal thing, but for me, I hate having my laptop drive constantly churning while I’m trying to work as it caches stuff. I’ve turned it off, and haven’t even noticed a difference in program opening speeds. But no more churning
Hey, whatever works for the individual, right?
P.S. The stat that firefox opens in 0.0 with superfetch on….that is pure nonsense.
don’t forget that these speeds are for Vista pre any SP vs XP SP2. By the time Vista is SP1 and then 2, it will not only beat XP, but it will leave it in the dust as well.
so IMO, Vista is nothing like ME; its even better than XP by far and to prove it google the performance reports for XP before SP1. u will see what I mean
My experience is with a machine running Vista Business that is member of a Server 2003 domain. I’ve tried several config changes that were suggested based on googling this problem, to no avail. I’ve also found content where MS apparantly states that this is a known problem. Don’t know if this is accurate.
Anyone had similar problems?
Mule
Majority of Windows Vista-based PCs boot in less than a minute… yeah, mine does now that I’m maxed out at 4GB RAM. It came with 1MB and Home Premium and I couldn’t do anything for at least 5-6 minutes until it was done. Now that I have 4GB (2.9 usable – bleh), it actually runs half decently. Crashes requiring reboot are a lot fewer than XP, for sure. The only thing now is for MS to fix driver issues for all the software (especially OpenSource) that still doesn’t work with Vista. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it – as happy as any other version, 98SE excepted.
I can vouch for no problem using Vista on 4 notebooks on a SBS2k3 network.
I’ll take your word for the problems muledoggie. I myself had no issues using home premium to connect to the server, the biggest issues I encountered were the speed at which files transferred. The other thing I truly hate about Vista is how much harder they made it to make a connection to a VPN. In order to connect I had to first go to control panel. In XP I created the connection then could use the connect to menu or a shortcut on the desktop to connect. It was simple and fast. I suspect I could make a shortcut if I knew the trick, but the point is they made it harder to do this. To me that is backwards. It should always be easier moving forward, not the other way around.
It tries to use up as much of your RAM as possible by preloading your apps into memory…that’s SuperFetch. If the computer needs the memory it will free it, but it would rather have your apps and documents ready to go at a beckon call.
I have seen some reports of increased performance in certain areas for XP SP3, but generally it doesn’t seem all that different on my one machine running SP3.
From what I’ve read it’s not supposed to have any effect on the hard drive with the exception of the first few minutes after the computer starts. That’s when it reads from the disk and loads stuff into memory.
Interesting…my laptop with 2GB of memory is ready to use in about 45 seconds. After about 2 minutes it has finished loading everything, but it becomes usable in well under a minute.