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

Re:Hard to argue with statistics

[gergi]

you admit to running XP?! on /.?!?! man, you've got some balls!

btw, you deserve to rot in hell you microsoft lackey

I wouldn't be surprised ...

[x mani x]

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's hardware partners/clients (at the very least every major PC maker out there), at least indirectly pressured Microsoft to encumber the operating system. Doing this would give consumers the justification they need to get back into the market and buy a new PC.

I remember hearing from several news sources that PC market sales are down about 11% ... I wonder if this value has any correlation to this 11% performance hit. (i know, i know, taking the term "reaching" to new lows :))

While I have no intention of purchasing Windows XP, I hope that it increases consumer spending in general. While consumer spending is crap lately, especially after September 11th, the NASDAQ index is going up almost everyday. Windows XP sales (and subsequent PC purchasing due to its system requirements), could boost consumer spending and be a small step to ending this recession.

In the end, I don't think XP's slowdown is very evil. This is what happens when you have a massive codebase, and you have to keep some level of backward-compatibility in mind. Just look at MacOS X, a great OS but significantly slower than previous iterations of MacOS. The same could be said for the popular desktop environments available on UNIX.

The problem with people who own slow computers

[cpeterso]

People who own slow computers are cheapskates. They are still running Windows 95 OSR1 on their beefy 486. They are not lucrative customers. People with deep pockets by fast computers and want software with new features. These people spend money. Microsoft likes money.

Why, then, do people say Linux is pretty damn efficient on your ol' 486? It's because it is free. Linux developers cannot afford to buy new computers from the money they make selling their open source software. These broke cheapskates download Linux and thus optimize for their sad computers.

Microsoft can afford to buy its engineers shiny, new computers, so they don't really care what the rest of the world does. As long as those stock options and pr0n keep comin' fast, they're happy!

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[beable]

Oh yes, XP crashes BEAUTIFULLY! The old Blue Screen Of Death was flat and boring, but XP's Blue Screen Of Death is simply GORGEOUS! It's got animation, drop shadows, bells, whistles, and a funny little cartoon of a sad computer. I just can't wait for XP to crash again! Luckily I don't have to wait long!

Re:not the only performance hit

[Red Avenger]

Have you actually used XP? It is the exact same thing tard.

InfoWorld has a Linux agenda and is full of crap!

[Drestin]

Paul at WinInformant wrote: "InfoWorld stood alone this week when it declared that Windows XP significantly underperformed Windows 2000 and Windows 9x in its tests. Not only do the controversial InfoWorld results fly in the face of Microsoft's published results and actual real-world use, they refute every independent XP performance test performed to date. One gets the idea that ... nah ... InfoWorld was trying to make XP lose. Don't believe me? Consider this: The following organizations have tested XP, independently of Microsoft: CNET/ZDNET, eTesting Labs, eWeek, PC Magazine, and PC World. All these independent labs came to the same conclusion: XP meets or exceeds the performance of Win2K and Win9x. The InfoWorld results are also at odds with real-world XP use, which already includes hundreds of thousands of beta testers, tens of thousands of IT professionals and developers, and hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers. "Microsoft has not received any indications that users are experiencing reduced performance compared with Windows 2000," a company spokesperson said. "We have had extensive feedback that Windows XP is better performing than Windows 9x." Go figure. And yet, you just know that every anti-Microsoft site on the planet is going to run with the InfoWorld story and not any of the positive stories. Ain't life grand?"

InfoWorld is full of crap - total liars. We have tested XP ourselves in a 110 PC test lab. It runs CIRCLES around the W2K SP2 machines we replaced. AND more important than some silly benchmarks, our users were able to do things easier and faster. They were able to figure things out for themselves instead of calling IT every 15 minutes.

InfoWorld is among the most anti-MS rags out there, next to The Register, and it's agenda has finally been revealed publically. There are 500,000 XP users out there today (including those who've used XP while it was in beta) that can prove that XP is faster than W2K.

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[non-poster]

Please don't abuse the English language anymore.

your != you're

Re:not the only performance hit

[aero6dof]

Ahh, but can you modify your organization's copy of XP so the same tweaks don't have to be repeated over and over again as you reinstall?

I didn't think so...

The problem: Orgasm features

[be-fan]

I can off the bat tell you the major problem software vendors are having: orgasm features. Things that make nerds' gonads tingle, but do little but take up space and speed for the user. Stuff like 90% of the things in MS Office, network transparency (99% people run local apps, besides, there is always Citrix), CORBA/DCOP (what's wrong with simple, FAST, COM?), "paradigms" (everything is a file, except the stuff that requires special hack system calls like ioctl() to actually do something useful), ease of development (KDE3's C bindings are automatically generated. Wonder how fast/optimized THOSE are?) I could go on for ever, but someone has already written up a list for me: check out www.gnome.org and www.kde.org. Of course, once in a blue moon, a useful feature slips in, like KDE's ioslaves (or MC's equivilant). But most of it is just jerk-of material for the developers.

PS> BTW, I'm typing this from a 99% (haven't figured out how grow XFS partition on the fly to include former Win2K partition, yet) Mandrake 8.1 box running KDE 2.2.1. It's cool as hell, but that doesn't make it any less slow.