InfoWorld says WinXP much slower than Win2K

iforgotmyfirstlogon submitted an InfoWorld story that makes the shocking claim that XP is slower then 2k for business use. Pretty graphs, comparisons of SMP, and they even tested without the eye candy. My favorite comment is this one "it appears that for light-duty service on the newest hardware, Windows XP with Office XP is an acceptable choice -- if an 11 percent performance hit, or 53 minutes added to an 8-hour day, is acceptable." And thats the best case scenario.

Comments

Not much of a surprise

[Shimmer]

Does anyone doubt that, say, Word 95 installed on Windows 95 would run circles around Word XP on Windows XP (on the same hardware)? I hope not. You can call it bloat, but there's probably a reason why people (not just "lusers", but also "power users" who "know better") keep upgrading anyways.

This is the foundation of the Wintel monopoly: Harness ever-expanding software to Moore's law and reap the benefits. We don't have to like it, but at this point its not a surprise either. Maybe instead we should try to understand why it's been so successful.

-- Brian

Re:not the only performance hit

[ConceptJunkie]

The first thing I did with XP was turn off that ugly, stupid, round, bouncy, primary-color assault they call "Aqua", wait... whatever they call it. Like almost every visual UI change uSoft has done in the past 10 years, it only chews up more screen real estate with wasted pixels.

Once that was changed, I had a reasonably lean, nice-looking UI with the benefits of the enhancements to the task bar (very nice!) and the start panel (kinda cool, but pointless IMO, also that can be turned off too). And on a laptop, ClearType is worth the upgrade price alone.

Now, configuring is another matter. For instance, I still can't always get volumes to share on my home network the way I want them to on the first try, but then again Joe Worduser isn't going to be doing those kinds of things.

OTOH, XP boots radically faster than Win2k on my IBM i-series laptop (Celeron 433, 192 MB RAM) and shuts down faster too.

Now going from 9x to NT/2K/XP, that takes some re-training :-)

Mostly in unlearning that you have to reboot your computer every hour.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[slow_flight]

I think what happens is that programmer's focus changes. When I first started as a professional programmer 12 years ago, we concentrated on code size. The distribution media of choice back then was the floppy disk, and we really, really wanted to keep our app small enough to distribute on a floppy. That, and user's hard drives were small. Priority one was code size (and remember that this priority ultimately resulted in the Y2K debacle).

Eventually disk and memory became cheap, so responsiveness became the focus. "Don't worry about spending a few more bytes, just make it faster." Then processor power became cheap too.

Now that memory and performance are more than adequate on the platform, the priority has become features. "Don't worry about how big it will be, memory is cheap. Forget about how slow it is, everyone that matters has at least a Pentium III to run it. Just get some new features in there asap."

My point is that code is slow and bloated because no one cares about that anymore, at least with regard to the 'unwashed masses'.

It's a lot like the way you grow into your income. I bought a house nine years ago when I was making one-third of what I make now, yet I still seem to go paycheck-to-paycheck even though I'm still in the same house.

Re:Wow... ignorance is bliss huh guys?

[borzwazie]

I have also tried XP. It has a lot of really nice features, and some not-so-nice things.

First of all, if you turn off all the GUI bloat (My Computer -> Properties -> Performance Settings) it is nicely quick indeed even on low-end machines PROVIDED that you have lots of RAM. A Celeron 400 with 192 megs of RAM boots into XP much faster than 2000 does, and performs at or above the level of 2000 with a similar amount of RAM.

It is true, with any newly-release software, that there are probably bugs and compatibility issues. But XP really shines in some areas, notable Firewire. A friend who had a 1394 card that he couldn't get to work in win98 lent me the card, so I tried it and a DV cam in XP. Not only did XP not need any drivers, it mounted the camera up as a drive instantly, and has a built-in image capture utility that works extremely well (though it could use some extra settings for images). Color me impressed as hell.

XP by default, installs about 1.2 gigs of stuff! It also ships with a number of security concerns like Remote Registry, Remote Desktop, and some other services turned on by default... XP also has a lot of services that are not necessarily security concerns, but, do we really need easy wireless configuration turned on by default if you don't have any wireless devices? Same for the camera image services. Those turn on if disabled as soon as you install a camera anyway. So, there's LOTS of room for memory bloat improvment. I got a significant speedup by disabling a lot of unneeded services (probably about 12-15 by default).

We in the linux community, instead of bitching, need to look at XP as the new target. Look how good OSX and XP are. If we want to remain a competitor, we need to make our desktops this good. No excuses.