Windows 7 vs Vista vs XP

[Lewis]

This is a old article, but it is interesting.

Windows 7 vs Vista vs XP

In Depth: Which Windows is best? We compare them all to find out

Read more: http://www.techradar...7#ixzz1NLmWnZ27


Buying a Windows OS used to be so simple. A new version appeared, most people agreed it was better than the last one and you'd get a copy for your next PC. Job done.

But Windows Vista changed all that. Despite many years of availability, Vista's poor reception means that computer manufacturers are still selling new systems with XP. It's also common for laptops to be downgraded from Vista to XP, with battery life reportedly improving as a result.

Deciding which operating system is best for you has become decidedly trickier, then, and the arrival of Windows 7 only complicates things further. Is the newcomer just Vista with a facelift? Or has Microsoft learned from its mistakes and delivered a product that will restore its battered reputation? Perhaps you should forget about Vista and Windows 7 altogether, opting for the mature XP instead?

Microsoft: new Vista PCs sold in EU can't upgrade to Windows 7

The choice might be easy. If you have old or extremely basic hardware, for instance, then XP will have a definite advantage: its relatively lightweight core means the operating system can theoretically run with only 64MB of RAM, so there'll be plenty of resources left over for your applications.

However, if you have high-end requirements, such as using a powerful PC to run heavy-duty applications, Vista and Windows 7 come into their own. They're better optimised for multicore CPUs, and Windows 7 in particular includes a number of tweaks to make the best of the latest hardware.

You may well find yourself somewhere between these two extremes, though, and so the 'best' OS to use will be a more difficult decision. But don't worry – help is at hand. We've taken a test PC and laptop, installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 on them and applied a number of testing real-life benchmarks to see which will come out on top. We're aware that speed isn't everything, though, so we've also explored the new features that each OS has introduced. To make life easy for you, we've split our findings over eight categories, with an overall verdict at the end.

So which is best - Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7? Read on to find out what we've uncovered.

Performance

It's often said that recent versions of Windows have become bloated, and it's hardly unreasonable to expect each new OS to perform better than its previous iteration. However, when Windows XP first appeared back in 2001, it was designed to run happily on 300MHz Pentium II CPUs with a mere 128MB of RAM. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the lightweight OS runs quickly on today's processors. Newer OSes can optimise for modern hardware and include more powerful features, but is this extra functionality really just slowing us down?

To find out, we decided to test each operating system's performance on an average PC. The system is nothing particularly special by today's standards, consisting of an Intel dual-core E5200 CPU, 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD4550 graphics card. We installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 in that order (all 32-bit versions) on the machine's 500GB hard drive and ran a number of real-world benchmarks to find out which OS was best.

The boot time test provided no surprises – Vista took the longest time to get started, XP came in second place and Windows 7 was the fastest.

Windows startup

SWITCHED ON: Tired of lengthy boot times? We bear good news. Even the beta of Windows 7 can beat Vista's sluggish start

At first it seemed like our file transfer benchmarks would deliver the same results. Vista produced poor copy speeds in our small file tests, XP again placed second and Windows 7 came out on top. But when we tried transferring larger 1GB files, Vista surprisingly just managed to win out over XP. Both were beaten by the speedy Windows 7, though.

This proved true for our application tests as well. Open a small Excel spreadsheet or PDF file, say, and XP beats Vista, but heavy-duty spreadsheets and PDF files opened faster under Vista than XP. Once again, however, both were trounced by the newcomer.

You might have spotted the theme here. Windows 7 delivered excellent results, beating or coming close to the performance of the lightweight XP in just about every category. It's quite remarkable given that this is an operating system still in beta. When all the drivers are fully finished, we should see even better performance.

If we'd run the benchmarks on a less powerful PC, perhaps one with only 1GB of RAM, then it's possible that Windows XP would have fared better than it did here. But for even a fairly basic modern PC, Windows 7 delivers the best performance around.

Read more: http://www.techradar...7#ixzz1NLmlmmLR

 

[th1b.taylor]

Being on a Christian Forum certain things should never rear their ugly heads but intelligent attempts to discuss Operating Systems has never failed, in the past, to draw some of the most slanderous and pointless counter posts.

In '07 I had finally had enough of the virus', worms, trojans and the Blue Screen of Death. As a result I kept my XP in place and did the dual boot thing with Ubuntu. In the next 3 months I came to be using the XP less than 5% of the time. Ubuntu was already the fastest growing OS in the world and it is so good that it has now passed Mac and is the number two OS in the world.

I own a 450 dollar copy of MS Office XP that will run very well on my 64 bit Ubuntu machine in the Wine Layer but i have long passed it over for Open Office and I am now using the free LibreOffice Suite. Since it opens documents in any format and can save any document in any format, I'll not be going back on this either. My largest concern about the switch was availability and cost of software when, in fact, the issue has been very well addressed by the Linux Community and was not an issue.

I was also held back for the longest time by the migration issue. The truth is, at least, in my case, there is no such issue! There is a program, ntfs3g, that comes on the OS Install, now, that I had to point and click to install in Ubuntu 7.10 with this program I need only to explore the Harddrive, in much the same manor as Windows does with the Explorer, open the Windows Partition by clicking on it, navigate to My Documents or whatever, Right Click, Copy and paste it into Ubuntu or I have the ability to navigate there with any of the better than twenty thousand free, business class programs that I just point and click to install.

Micro Soft Blew it bad by failing to plug the DOS Hole in their operating systems and I just cannot ever see me going back and I build Custom Boxes and refurbish used units for deserving college students and every one of them leaves here with Ubuntu. Some will be die hards and fight the Virus War until they die but I'm just to busy to let my machine sit until I or some other Tech can clean it out.

 

[tim-from-pa]

In '07 I had finally had enough of the virus', worms, trojans and the Blue Screen of Death......

I could not have said this better myself in all the Microsoft bashing posts I made.
Well done.....