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.

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!

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.