Posted on 11/27/2007 1:54:17 PM PST by Zakeet
Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.
In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft's newest operating system.
Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new Service Pack 1 beta package, is shown to be a laggard.
"The hoped for performance fixes [from Vista SP1] that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized," said Devil Mountain researchers, in a blog post summarizing their results.
The researchers compared patched and unpatched versions of Vista and XP running Microsoft Office on a dual-core Dell notebook. The results revealed the time taken to complete Office productivity tasks such as the creation of a compound document and presentation materials.
Devil Mountain researchers ran a mix of tests comparing existing versions of the operating systems -- the original Vista and XP SP2 -- and versions that had been patched with the latest updates -- Vista SP1 beta and XP SP3 beta. Tests were also run on machines with 1 Gbyte and 2 Gbytes of memory.
Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests -- regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer. In fact, XP proved to be roughly twice as fast as Vista in most of the tests.
(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
I think the corporate culture at MS now is so out of touch with what people want that they thought they could drive what people want. Therefore, Vista ended up being the proverbial camel being a horse designed by a committee.
From the short time I've looked at the BLB, and it's been really short, I'd say Logos has more although the BLB looks great for something that's free. I have a lot invested in my version of Logos, with many additional commentaries and packages added to the package.
The good news for me is Logos is getting ported to the Mac and will be available soon if it isn't already.
I’ve read about slip streaming cd’s that include the updates. Never tried it myself though. Turning it into an ISO should be easy as can be. Not sure how you would implement the updates to be part of the new install ISO image. Are you just adding the setup program with each update that you would still have to run once the re-install of the OS was complete? I don’t see how the updates would be integrated with the original W2K SP4 files. Please explain if you don’t mind. Thanks.
The files of the rollup all get copied into the I386 directory of the SP4 disk and overwrite any already located there. They all get installed in one pass. It's a little more complicated to update an original install disk up to SP4. I'd have to locate the instructions.
When Win9x "does something" it requires RAM(mem) to do it. When it is done "doing it", it is supposed to release the RAM it assigned for the task. Win9x is very poor at doing so, so one eventually winds up with most of the RAM assigned to doing nothing anymore, and Win winds up getting really slow, or locking up. That is why Win98 always seems to run better when it is freshly rebooted. That whole process is called "Memory Leak-down" or a memory leak.
It is not a problem on NT based systems (Win2k, XP, VISTA), but is evident in all of the Win9x DOS systems (Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinME).
It is largely controllable for the most part by simply restarting your 9x machine once a day, though you may still have problems when exiting large memory hungry programs, and may require a restart after such an event. NOTE: While evident in all Win9x systems, it is not a DOS problem. DOS is unaffected.
I am really talking of the top of my head here, as I am not running any 64bit boards as of yet, But I have a MINI98 that I use for diagnostics, which boots from CD and loads into a ram drive, and it works just fine on 64bit boards, and so does DOS (so far).
Just as DOS, a 16bit OS, works fine on a 32bit board, so a 32bit Win will work fine on a 64bit board, it just will not be capable of using the full capacity of a 64bit register. This supposedly translates into less technical performance, but is largely offset by the lightness of the OS in comparison to the more complex and newer OS's. As an example, Win3.11 WFWG in 16bit mode just simply FLIES on newer hardware. I mean SPANKY fast, even though it has no ability to use the full capacity of the board.
There are problems, however. Video and Sound are addressed differently in VISTA in order to fully implement Digital Rights Management (DRM). How that is going to bear on hardware changes, and how that can be overcome is yet to be determined. It is getting likely that 9x compatible drivers will go away, leaving the basic OS functional, but without access to sound and VID without running inside a VM inside another OS (XP/Vista).
The only other real issue is Win9x's inability to handle vast amounts of installed RAM. I don't care what anyone says, anything close to or exceeding 512 mg of RAM is really a crap-shoot as to whether Win9x will run well or even run at all. Since most modern boxes already have far more RAM than 512mg, this is already a problem for dual-booters, even now.
This is generally fixed by calculating the overage in RAM, and installing a ram-drive of that size from DOS, before WIN is called. This has the effect of using the overage in RAM up as an additional (really fast) virtual hard drive, so WIN will have the prerequisite 512mgs or less to deal with upon starting.
Check out e-Sword... Totally free, self contained off-line application, multiple bibles, commentaries, dictionaries and etc. Truly excellent- though I do not know if it works in MAC or *NIX...
MaximDecim has a really cool upgrade... Shoehorned the USB2.0 stack from Win2k into 98SE... and there is also a univeral mass storage driver for win98SE that works a charm. You can find them in the forum at Exuberant's site (Exuberant sp-2 rollup and tweaks, another must have). There is also a good fix for large files in Win Exploder there too... I am on the road, but will get you a link when I am not illegally catching air at a coffee shop. More tonight.
Mass storage is never a problem, it’s the ‘flash’ sticks that can be problematic, since there is no applicable standard for them. All of the real hard disks run fine, even the little Giga-Bank 1 inch drives.
Forgive me, I should have specified "Native generic USB mass storage driver".
With the USB2.0 stack, and the USB mass storage driver, one seldom sees any problem- My card reader picks up natively (no added drivers), my portable USBHdds and CDWriters also have no worries, and I can always use thumbs of any kind.
BTW, there IS a very serious problem using Win98's native mass storage driver with internal HDDs bigger than 137 gig- It WILL lunch the partitions. One can fix that by using a controller card for your big drives (uses it's own driver), or use the repair titled "Enable48bitLBA"... That fix is also available at Exuberant's forum.
At any rate, The Exuberant Unofficial Service Pack is a great place to start, and Exuberant's forum, and the sites linked from it, are the clearinghouse and absolute authority for Windows 98SE updates an bolt-ons:
If you bought the SKU for Vista with downgrade rights when you got the PC or ordered it with XP you’re fine running XP on that box. If you just got a straight Vista license you have to have a full retail license for XP to legally run it on that box. MS pulled the standard “buy the new software and run an older one under that license” policy with Vista. And they’re making the downgrade rights a timed thing, to expire in X years, currently 3, but I feel sure that they feel free to shorten that without notice. It's also not legal to take a license for XP you got with an old PC (unless you bought full retail XP in the box) and move it to a new PC under MS licensing terms. I'm at the end of a large Software Asset Management project and, believe me, I'm buried in this sort of legal minutae. It may not make sense, but if you're not careful you personally can be open to big fines and, if this is your company PC it could have criminal implication (at the extremes) for you corporate officers.
Microsoft is also taking away the right of their OEMs to sell XP licenses with their PCs. Originally it was going to be January, but they’ve pushed that back to June. At that point we have to stop buying PCs with XP licenses and start buying PCs with a Vista licenses, but we can choose the “downgrade rights” version and load our XP image. That's a special part number. That's what I meant by "SKU."
The big kicker is that XP goes on “extended support” in April of ‘09, which means that only security patches will be available for free after that. MS is making noises about lots of things that we would probably consider critical, both security and non-security, being unavailable without big bucks because of how they classify them. We ran into a situation like this after Win 2K went on extended support and this year's daylight savings time change was exposed as a problem. That fix was drop dead critical to lots of corporate software including legal issues (e.g. SOX compliance) and MS wanted $50,000 for that patch from us. We negotiated hard and got it down big time but we also gave them some things in our EA renewal negotiations that we didn't want to. It was ugly.
Most of my peers in corporate IT at my level (Fortune 100) are skeptical that they’ll get away with it, in the long run. I’m cynical enough to think it’s possible, even if not likely, therefore I have to plan as if it's a sure thing and we'll be forced to switch to Vista and sooner rather than later.
I’m running what looks like a year long project (at least, probably closser to 18 months) to examine Vista and plan any necessary migration. I “own” over 30,000 PCs worldwide and it looks like it’s going to be a real pain. In my industry the norm is to install something and never upgrade it until it breaks or we're forced kicking and screaming, including software. When I tell one of our business units that they have to upgrade some big business critical IT system ($$$$$) because it's not compatible with Vista I'm gonna get shot.
We won't go back and put Vista on existing PCs, but at some point we may start buying new PCs with Vista as we replace PCs in our normal lifecycle. If something comes up that forces us to move in a hurry to Vista company wide (e.g. SAP only supports running their client on Vista for some reason) we'll do a bulldozer and replace old PCs, no matter how new, with new ones running Vista, configured "correctly" (e.g. drop dead minimum 1 gig, probably 2, at least something like an Athlon 64 if not a dual core CPU from AMD or Intel rather than our current standard Intel Celeron with 512 MB).
I’m running Vista on a company PC (Dell GX755) at home as my main personal system right now to get more familiar with it and it’s really a pain. I’m actually used to and like some of the user interface changes and like some of the new features. I’m a sucker for things like the Sidebar and I love widgets. Those things actually fit the way some of our mill operations are run and could be useful, especially being native integrated part of the OS. The problem for me is that it’s a hog and that it’s "not real stable." I’m actually getting set to reformat and reload it on this PC (in the process going from a RAID 1 mirror on two 250 gig disks to RAID 0... woohoo! Enough disk space for, what, two weeks?).
This PC is a "show off" version of our upcoming standard model as our old standard goes end of life, which is still slated to be a Celeron box. In addition to the big honkin’ drives on this test system it has an Intel quad core Q6600 at 2.4 GHz, 4 gig RAM (I’m using 32 bit Vista so that translates to 3316 “usable”), one 22” wide and one 19” ~square display in extended desktop. Vista runs fast enough on this hardware. <g>
Part of the project is deciding IF we move and what alternative moves might be if XP becomes a problem after going on extended support. That means I'm also going to get to play with Linux desktop systems and... shudder... Macs. I came across this interesting article (from PC Mag, of course) referencing the new Mac vs PC ads with the annoying guy from Die Hard 4: Leopard Is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off. It's not what you think. He does say that Leapord isn't all that and shouldn't be dissing Vista until they solve their own problems, but he likes Tiger as "better than both of them."
You also said:
I’ve never had any problems with XP Professional.
With over 30,000 PCs to worry about you can imagine what I think of that statement <g>
Thanks—I'm going to add links for e-Sword and BLB on some of my pages for others to checkout.
I’ve had similar experiences. I do like the operations of Vista and its appearance. But.....it’s slower on several applications. you know what
I
mean?
I wouldn't suppose.
Sorry no link, I was mobile at the time.
Glad you like e-Sword. The only downside is a serious boot time once/if one loads it heavy with plugs. All in all, though I have been quite happy with it for several years.
XP SP3 will be Microsoft's acknowledgement that Vista is a failure. Otherwise, why allow Vista's security features to be added to XP?
I know a guy who purchased Logos and wants to sell it because he likes e-Sword. I’d never checked it out until you posted the link. Me, I wired up to get into the details of the details, so Logos works for me. Then again, people think I’m weird. ;-)
You should be aware that the author of the ;pissed" article experiences are far from typical. He's a relative Mac newby and many of his complaints are due to ignorance of how the system works. He has also garnered some of his complaints from some forums and personalized them as though he had experienced them. Most of them would be solved by installing Leopard as a clean install and then upgrading to OSX.5.1 which he says he was told not to do by an IT guy.
I am running Leopard on a MacBook Pro, 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB,and the only problem I have experienced was that ASM, a small utility that adds a running Application menu to the Menu bar did not display the Dock Contextual menus correctly (fixed within two weeks) and two games from Popcap not working (downloaded the fixed versions of those yesterday).
I also have it running on a multiuser G5 Tower, 1.6GHz single PPC, 1.5GB with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and WIFI at home... No problems beyond an initial install blue screen on boot-up because I had an early version of Unsanity Software's Application Enhancer (APE) installed. That was fixed by an "archive and install."
I picked up Dell’s upgrade license when I bought my new corporate D620. I purchased XP with upgrade certificate for Vista.
My IT department manages about 4,000 XP units and it’s been a significant improvement over anything else MS has offered.
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