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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.
Just installed XP on a local system. It's definitely slower than 2K. Are the drivers going to be brought up to speed to make upgrading worth the hassle? The extra stability is definitely one reason to migrate.
You also have a huge amount of retraining because XP doesnt look or act anything like the NT4.0 or Win2K models.
You now need to re-train your users on how to use the Operating system...
Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
how this is ANY different from every previous release of Windows?
Hell, even Linux distributions are starting to follow this trend.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Don't you know? Of course it's going to run slower: It's got all those extra features that win2k didn't have like um... hmmm...
Nosce te Ipsum
That said, the upgrade to XP seems like a poor idea for people already using Windows 2000 (mostly because of licensing issues, IMHO).
As Linux for the desktop gets better, I hope that Windows 2000 will be the last version of Windows that I will ever purchase (OK, wishfull thinking).
Mark Watson
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
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Anandtech had this same article a couple months ago, the first based on RC1 and the second based on the Gold master. Yeah WinXP is slower. I don't think anyone is suprised by this since they had to make it backwards compatible with 9x to get everything to run and migrate smoothly. I'll stick with 9x till I can afford to upgrade my K6-2. weee
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
And MacOS X.1 actually takes 53 minutes off of your work day. I think this is pretty subjective, so I'll make my own claims. My computer at Work (Win NT) is constantly getting blue screens, unexpected errors (access violation), and other freezes. My Mac at home, which I do the same things on, is rock solid, and doesn't look like a throwback to the 70's.
today is spelling optional day.
"InforWorld story that makes the shocking claim that XP is slower then 2k for business use"
even more shocking is that InfoWorld has changed their name to InforWorld, and that the previously respectable publication has taken to printing such elementary mistakes as "slower then" rather than "slower than"
troll me, flamebait me, i don't care. you should check your spelling and learn the difference between the common homonyms! and here i thought this site was for geeks and nerds...
Ok, so I'm not exactly a microsoft fan but I got XP professional recently because as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how it works, and what it does...
But I'm suprised because I subjectivly find it works noticably faster than 2000 seemed to do. Programs seem to load quicker and ot just seems more responsive. Could be because I reformatted and defragmented my disk I suppose.
Have to agree with the comments about moveing things around. Not a problem for me, but it did take me ages to find a few things first time.
Sig is taking a break!
It's hard to argue with statistics from an authoritative source, but I'm running XP right now and I have XPerienced no qualitative decrease in performance over my old Win2K install. I would say I fit into the power-user category since I usually multi-task through a couple of applications and run with about 8 windows of something or other open at a time. I can't benchmark with pretty graphs, but I don't think I'm losing 53 minutes a day or even five.
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In the end there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks.
As someone who's used XP, the time lost (microseconds per day) are more than made up for with the added reliability of the system and the much easier recovery process. (Personal experience -- I was evaluating the system for work and purposely installed some crappy drivers that I knew would blow up; the system recovered just fine)
I read this in the print version of InfoWorld a few days ago and got pissed off then too. If you're going to beat up on M$, do it better for crying out loud. This is just like the dumb VM debates for Linux.
I think the review is a bit unfair. I'm running Office XP on Windows XP here and find it just as fast as Office 2000. They've overlooked the fact that Windows XP starts way faster than Windows 2000. This is only on a Duron 700 with 128Mb of ram.
Now with compiler optimizations!
Win XP can be slow if you leave all the graphical eye candy on. Go to the system menu, find the settings button that lets you "adjust settings for best performance." There is a very noticable speed up on my 1.33 GHz T-bird. I'll bet the benchmarks were run with the settings adjusted for best look.
It's easy to point to certain features in a new OS as examples of progress, but end-users often find that a new OS performs like molasses compared to the version they were using.
So why does that happen? Well I'll tell you my educated guess: every year, electrical and computer engineers make amazing advances with comptuer hardware, making RAM more plentiful and less expensive, making hard drives larger and faster, implementing devices like L2 cache to decrease read/write times, and most popularly making Processors faster than ever (at least by clock speed.) You would think that these advances would make all software simply fly, be faster and more responsive than ever, and you'd have unlimited storage space for your files. However, that's not the way it is, and somehow, you still run out of disk space, don't have enough RAM, and have programs running slow (on a 2 GHZ Machine!!!) So what is it? Programmers. "Computer Scientists," rather than improving on software that ran well on old architectures, go by the thought process "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources. I'm not saying all Comp Sci's do this, I mean look at Linux, it's pretty damn efficient. When it comes to commercial apps though like Windoze, rather than make something extraordinarily efficient that runs on the newest machines, they say "well the hardware takes care of efficiency, let's just make something with a lot of bells and whistles." What you end up with is grossly large applications that sloth along on extremely powerful machines that have the capability to be so much more. This is yet another reason to use Linux.
~ now you know
XP has, for a while now, been essentially billed as an upgrade to Win 9x/ME rather than Win 2K. (look in your favorite software site -- you see upgrades for Win 9x but NOT Win 2K) And at least stability-wise, Win XP is a drastic improvement over Win 9x.
Really no news here, then IMO.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
I'm really suprised by the benchmarks they came up with... On my system XP runs all applications much faster than 2000. Outlook, Internet Explorer, a big increase in Photoshop 6...
It takes half as long to boot and I've even left some of the fancy GUI stuff on.
Hmm.. the article didn't address how much ram each of the systems had. If they had anything under 256 (most OEM systems come w/ 64 or 128), that would explain why 2000 was so much faster. XP need a good amount of memory to work right. Oh, and before someone screams that their linux box only needs 8 ram... a 256MB dimm is only $30 bucks!
I have been using Windows XP with Office XP to do work, for the last few days. The upside is it is good for beginners while keeping the features of 2k. If one has never used an NT version of windows they are very likely to be impressed (and IMO rightly so).
On the flipside, it does seem to be a little slower than 2k, and somewhat buggy working with third party software (particularly games). Assumedly this will be working out in coming bug fixes witch MS solicits from you every time an application crashes.
In other words I would enthusiastically recommend it to a home windows user. In an office that already uses a version of NT on the other hand, the switch may not be necessarily.
Limited sample size of two workstations, YMMV.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
53 minutes is a surely marking figure but i don't think it's honnest:
Many of Office's work is done WHILE the user type things or think about a nice sentence etc...
Not so many users have an Office that is 100% occupied all day long... (if this were the case then 53 minutes would be true)
About the OS, well it was obvious it was gonna be slower, but i'm disappointed nonetheless
I don't know if I'm gonna cop.. buy it... I think it's the general trend for the OSes to get slower and slower and if you don't want it, keep your CP/M machine
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
Opening/Saving/Rending Filters in Photoshop appear to run much faster than they did in ME.
Would this be due to XP being an NT system (NT 5.1, I think)rather than a system that's essentially a shell for DOS?
Any comments from anybody that knows a bit more about the subject than I would be much appriciated.
Excuse the asstacular spelling, lack of sleep...
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
You can knock it all you want but it won't stop the 100 million people who will buy it. It's slow and has security holes bigger than ICQ circa 1998 but there is a lot of solid interface research that went into making it. People will use it because it is going to be installed on their new computer. And they'll grow atatched to it because it's what they know. Sometimes the winner isn't who's best suited for the job but the one that is most familiar to the user.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.
What a load.
XP is the first time since Windows 95 that Microsoft has made a major change in the look and feel of the GUI. As 95 begat 98 which begat ME (and NT 4 begat 2000) minor things have changed such as the placement of the Windows Explorer icon and a Control Panel group or two, but the same basic grey bar at the bottom of the screen with the start button has always remained.
Every 2 years? Complete FUD.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Slashdot is so predictable. The second I, and many other people who enjoy knowledge over ignorance, read the Infoworld benchmarks... I knew that Slashdot would post these, and ONLY these, and ignore the many other benchmarks that show WinXP performs as good if not better than 2k.
... 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?"
For instance, here is what Paul from WinInformant has to say:
"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
Looks like he hit that nail right on the head, huh?
How can this be!
I'm so shocked, did I really think that new version of Windows would be faster than older ones? No!
Please tell me even one Windows which was faster than its predecessor?
I heard XP is a crippled version of Win2k, like the Celeron is a crippled Pentium. Apparently the main differences with XP are:
1) XP gets a slightly re-worked "Microsoft Bob" interface, designed to slow user interaction by 20%.
2) Mail handling DLL's are specially tuned to only spread VB worms at the rate of 5 address book entries per second (Win2k does 10 per second).
3) Mad swapping begins to occur every 3 minutes, instead of 6 in XP.
These are all designed-in performance features intended to prevent dilution of the Windows 2000 market.
I wanted to run Win2k at home but various cheap and rather suspect hardware and peripherals wouldn't allow me to (video capture, smart media reader) as well as some software didn't like the migration to the NT platform vary well.
I imagine there may be a few others like me out there who want the stability of 2000, just can't run it for compatability reasons - and thus we're left with WinXP.
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That's interesting. I ran Win98 since it came out and had crash after crash with it...I generally had to reboot at least once a day, though I do a lot of gaming on it, and I've found ever since Windows 95, it's easier to crash a machine playing DirectX games than any other operation.
Ever since I got Win2K, I have not ONCE had it crash on me. Admittedly, it's still slower than my Linux install and it's a hell of a lot more fun to screw around with mod_perl on Linux, but for all the gaming that I do, Win2K has been much more of a godsend than I thought possible from Microsoft.
My only complaint is that Win2K seems to be waiting for a network timeout or something before giving me a login prompt, so I stare at this bluish screen for about 2 minutes until suddenly the comp wakes up again and gives me the prompt. Nobody has been able to tell me what I need to turn off to fix this, but it ain't the DHCP or DNS registration startup processes.
Running Word 6.0 on Windows 3.11 a Pentium 4 significantly outperforms Office Xp on the same machine!!!
Who'da thunkit?
If God gave us curiosity
Where did they get these stats? A system isn't just 11% slower, it is slower in certain areas. Also, the 58 minutes seems like a very exact number. Will it be 58 minutes more for my amd 1.4 and my pentium 3 450?
I'm not saying that window's xp isn't slower, i'm just saying that people shouldn't just throw numbers around without saying exactly what they mean.
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Come on, MS does not build for performance, it is built around the bells and whistles and ease of use.
And that is what sells the product (IMO).
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
I'd be curious how any performance hit will affect developers and powerusers, especially since the .NET dev environment is a pig (need at least 256MB RAM on a 700+ MHz processor just to not be constantly tearing your hair out waiting for it to clunk along...). If you're a .NET developer, paying M$ $1000 per year to develop .NET services, I'd think you'd want to maximize your dev time available... but then again, most developers spend only 47 some odd days programming each year anyways ;-)...
"Content's a bitch."
I write code for a living, and while I've got a well tuned linux box to do all my compiling, any (speed) advantages it has over an $800 low-end Windows box when I'm writing emails or posting to /. is lost when I pause at the end of a sentence to consider my next thought.
(voiceover indicating speed being wasted goes here)
Your "average" user, in all likelihood, isn't running 100% processor intensive tasks. They're composing emails, or preparing presentations, or IMing their coworkers about the wording of some useless document. An 11% slowdown is going to cost them seconds on a day, not minutes. Certainly not 53 minutes.
Now don't get me wrong, I hate Windows with a passion, but isn't this the same kind of FUD we've been laughing at for years, just going in the other direction?
(Besides, who works an 8 hour day?)
Remember, kiddies, this is what's called "a feature". Now drink your Kool-Aid and do The Manic Balmer Mazurka!
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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 wonder if this value has any correlation to this 11% performance hit. (i know, i know, taking the term "reaching" to new lows :))
I remember hearing from several news sources that PC market sales are down about 11%
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.
Windows XP takes more memory than Windows 2000. If the benchmarks were done on a 128MB machine, I wouldn't be surprised by them. On a 256MB machine, I'd be more surprised. On a 512MB machine, I'd be extremely surprised.
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i upgraded to xp from 98se, and even though i've noticed a slight (but quite acceptable) performance hit, the dramatically increased stability makes up for it completely. i would much rather have my system run a little slower and much more reliably than have it chugging a little faster but having any given application bring it down every couple days.
"I just want to thank my coach Eric a.k.a. Disco for shattering my reality..."
I've been using 2k for over a year, and it has *NEVER* crashed. Hence, I'm rather pleased with it.
Most if not all users of XP will be using a bang up-to-date machine, and XP will run like a dream. Those with slower hardware who are not happy with windows should consider switching to Linux or some other OS.
This time, there is no reason to bash XP as a product, it is a rock-solid, stable, performant, secure OS. Just like slashdot's much loved Linux.
The difference is it has the backing of Microsoft, and one of the best marketing machines on the planet behind it. I think it is essentially futile for the open source community to try and fight it. It is like lying down in front of a tank. A nice gesture, but ultimately futile.
I wish it weren't the case, but sadly it is.
But what about the user experience? Is speed everything?
Here's an article... that gets at the usability of XP (in relation to Win98 not Win2K).
What do you think? How important is performance versus ease of use and the other user experience factors?
How to Download YouTube Videos
considering how often you are going to have to reboot! :)
Microsoft is obviously not interested in making a better product in Windows XP. This product is expressly for making money. The whole license concept behind XP is the reason for its existance.
Let's all think about this realistically. The 'slow' speed of XP will not prevent it from become the most popular of operating systems. It will be mass marketed to people who don't care, so MS can get away with trashy code. Also, in two years our computers will be running twice as fast anyways no? 'I'll never get Windows 2008!'
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
that if the present trend continues they'll have to change their name to MicrosoftWorld.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
First of all I'm a linux bigot and there is absolutely no way I'll buy the piece of @#$@! Second of all as embarrasing as it is my wife's box is a W2k box because Jumpstart Kindergarten and other such programs for the kids won't run on linux (its a conspiracy I tell you!).
All that being said, I'd expect Windows 9x/ME users to experience slowdown. XP is supposed to be NT 6.0 right? So that being said, is the professional version slower than W2k with double the amount of RAM and maybe 25% more processor power (that's a given with all microsoft releases, those of us who know better run linux on 512MB and experience a near instantaneous responsiveness.. I give you a new law to replace moores. Every 2-4 years microsoft with come up with a new release of [name your M$ product] and the ram requirements will double)?
Despite the way I phrase this, I'm genuinely interested.
-Andy
Oh, the silly things Intel marketing makes journalists say. Since when is the Pentium 4 faster than a Pentium III of lower clock speed in day-to-day apps? As far as I know the only apps where the P4 is significantly faster are either ones with SSE2 or Quake 3.
Comparing a 1.5GHz P4 to 2 1 GHz PIII's is absolutely insane without at least first comparing it to 1 PIII. Especially when you are talking business apps. The P4 will continue to be a dog until Intel pushes it past the 3GHz mark. And if AMD can hold their own it might even be a dog then.
Calling the 1GHz PIII "relatively slow" in the same breath as calling a 1.5GHz P4 "blazingly fast" makes me giggle. Back to NetHack.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Anybody else find it funny that Taco didn't decide to make the title "InfoWorld says Win2k is much faster than WinXP" ??
I don't run XP, but an office mate near me does.
He and I seem to show up for work about the same time and leave work at about the same time.
So do I have some kind of Buckaroo Banzai living 53 minutes in the future thing going on? Do ya think?
XP is a great improvement over Win2k for the laptop users. Much faster boot/shutdown and hibernate/dehibernate cycles. I installed XP RC2 on my Dell Inspiron 5000e (1600x1200 screen) without needing to install a single additional driver.
.97a My desktop machines at work are running Linux and Solaris.
Performance wise: Subjective performance is better, esp with startup/login/dehibernate... I can't detect any speed difference in application performance. I develop in VB/Java/SQL Server often simultaneously... Definately a more severe test than average.
No hangs, crashes, etc to date (and on a beta XP install.)
Altogether almost as significant of an improvement over Win2k as Win2k was over WinNT4.
I'm not pro-MS either... I've been a loyal Linux user since
It's not really supprising, I've installed XP on my dual celeron 400 system and a week later, I've trashed it and reinstalled win2k.
There are 2 issues here. The HOME version and the (supposely) PRO version.
the PRO has WAY too much "take me by the hand I am a complete newbie" stuff in it, too much monitoring, too much popups for crap that I should do myself anyways. While I can understand this in the "home version", it's PERFECT for home, it's nice looking easy and made for newbies... but the professionnal version really is NOT aimed at professionnals that's for sure...
heck I can see myself if I need updates
I can see myself if my drives are full
I don't need any importer utilities to copy files from my previous version, even less converting my Mp3 to WMA
I don't need a stinkin popup window everytime I throw in a CD-R or RW.
Etc...
Oh and for those who will say "you can turn them off too you know?" Well, I don't need these options turned on by default and having to turn them all off just to be less annoyed right off the start, it should be the opposite, no? (again for the pro version, not home).
I don't want this to be a flame, even if it sounds like bitching, but if you look at the points mentionned, it's weird that a "pro" version has all of these little annoying things, people that will buy pro are used to NT/2K environment (usually) so why would he downgrade to the "clippy-age" when he upgrades?
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I can't keep up with a 433 MHz Celeron. So I have two choices:
1. Run distributed.net and find optimal golum rulers.
2. Update to a "bloated" new version of Windows that will do a few neat things for me with those extra cycles, and still run some d.net blocks.
Ask InfoWorld to run a real processor-intesive task (say, COMPILING Office XP/Mozilaa/etc), something that isn't drawing-limited.
User-interactive programs well be UI-limited before CPU-limited. Processing tasks are CPU-limited. Doesn't matter that Word can deal with 1000 words a second, I only type 60 per minute. So what if automatic spell checking, grammar checking, Microsoft Thought Police (tm), and other things slow Word down to 1000 words a minute, it's still faster than I can type.
I like Ximian GNOME for much the same reason: I can trade off my unused cycles for some graphical glitz. It's still faster than I am.
There are lies; there are damn lies; and then there are Benchmarks.
It's a known fact that XP is slower then 2000, due to Microsoft rebranded and lack of code optimisation upon the few "upgrades".
/me looks in the direction of Media Player and IE6
So while I understand that it's lots of fun to find a site which claims that WinXP is 10% slower and doesn't do the laundry or clean the kitchen and trumpet it on Slashdot, don't let just the one site be your guide.
For example [firingsquad.com] here is a site (and a cite) that claims XP actually offers slight improvements over 2k.
Even some [zdnet.co.uk] lacking benchmarks still claim that XP is faster than 2k.
Come on now, let's do some research before we spread misinformed FUD of our own!
What do MSFT employees use? Has MSFT upgraded all their systems to XP?
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
This is, if anything, further proof against Microsoft. Perhaps we should face the fact that Microsoft writes crappy software (using Visual Basic) and crappy operating systems. No attention is payed to efficiency, clearly. Solution: Leave them behind.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
After a lot of Microsoft Hype and and Windows Zelots saying this is is version that will kill the need for Linux and Unix. With this new version claiming better performance, and will not crash, and better multitasking. Then shortly after its release flaws in the software are found and it just dosent to seem to run that much better then before. And it seemed that the old version seems to be running a little faster. Hmm. I never expected XP to end up like 95
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Actually, it's like going from NT 5.0 to NT 5.1, check the OSVERSIONEX yourself to see! :-)
This could be terrible for Microsoft. If XP is consistently slower than W2K in all tests, the upgrade sales could plummet. Then people would realize how the monoloply works when they get an os they don't want next time they buy a pc.
Oh. And I'm a karmawhore today.
Stop the brainwash
Simply put: bah. I'm not a fan of microsoft or XP, but the notion that computing performance is related to productivity is a bit specious.
YES, a machine that is absurdly slow is useless. But for productivity (office) applications, computing performance is irrelevant. There's just too much horsepower in the low end to even notice differences.
If you have million cell spreadsheet you're probably steemed at me right now. If you do a lot of compiling then you think I'm an idiot. But if you're trying to pick an OS for 99% of business users than you're not going to consider an 11% performance hit relevant.
My cat can eat a whole watermelon
that this was kinda obvious. high resolution and 65,000 do not a faster computer make
I have to work for an extra 53 minutes each day since we switched to Windows XP. My job is to hit the recalc button on my spreadsheet 42,000 times a day.
I've decided to switch all our desktops to multi processor machines too. Small performance increases (and of course, computer performance is THE bottleneck for worker productivity) are well worth raising our hardware expenditure by 50%.
Of course XP is a little slower, but that's neither critical information, nor all that surprising. At least he could have done benchmarks on server software (where performance is a little more of a limiter).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I heard that, in order to address these Windows XP performance issues, Microsoft will be adopting the new Linux VM. The AA VM in Linux 2.4 is well-respected for its time-tested design, mature code base, and high performance under heavy pr0n load.
cpeterso
I installed XP on my work laptop, 650mhz p2. No slow down if you turn off the pretty gfx, its the same speed. Friends with older PC's have told me its slower and have stayed with win2k, ymmv.
But windows networking FLYS compared to my win2k. I can open network domains with 10000+ pc's and it only takes seconds now. Printers and shares now remember the passwords. I can log transparently into a domain for printer shares only. Network login is actually faster now. FTP transfers are the same speed thou. I dont like to log into the domain, but It authenticates me for printers and exchange.
Only crash I'ved had was the 3dfx driver I have in my docking station, disabled the onboard ati card and no problems. The reason I run a 3dfx pci voodoo3, its pci half-height, and does 1600x1200.
On my Home PC, dual 800, I left the gfx on, and turned off shadow menus, that was the main slow down. Only crashs are the geforce nvidia driver (28.88 with newest gf2mx bios, god love those russian unreleased driver/bios sites)
that this was kinda obvious. high resolution and 65,000 colors do not a faster computer make.
The first question that comes to mind is:
When has a new Windows release EVER performed faster than a previous one??
Where is the news here??
Take care,
Brian
Brian
--
http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/
Yes, maybe if you type 3000 words a minute, that 0.2 second extra load time on your Word file of your favorite porn sites may effect your productivity.
The author of the article forgot to mention the amount of RAM on the test machines. When publishing the results of a benchmark one is supposed to include all configuration details so that others can replicate it. What's the use of a benchmark if it's not replicable ? The amount of RAM is certainly an important factor for overbloated applications like OfficeXP.
I'd suggest Infoworld to take a look at sites like www.firingsquad.com to learn how to publish benchmarks.
The Raven.
The Raven
Our tests of the multitasking capabilities of Windows XP and Windows 2000 demonstrated that under the same heavy load on identical hardware, Windows 2000 significantly outperformed Windows XP.
Windows 2000 beat Windows XP to the Blue Screen of Death, huh? Back to the drawing board fellas!
Also just in, Windows XP slower than DOS. I don't want to sound like a troll here, but does this suprise anyone? Duh... They don't go for speed updates in thier new releases. It works that way in the Linux world too. KDE 1.x vs 2.x comes to mind. WinXP needing more resorces than its predecessors? I can't believe it! Yes, it's incredible bloat-ware, but the fact that MS does this shouldn't be a shock to anyone. What is a joke is the minimum requirement of 64MB of RAM. Win2k needed at least 192 if you planned on opening more than 3 apps at once. uugh... MS sucks.
Besides, as has been mentioned already, a system that performs 11% slower than another only means 53 minutes out of an 8 hour day if your CPU is 100% busy all the time.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
But those 'pretty little pictures' show a guy writing, editing, printing and ecommercing War and Peace in 53 seconds flat.
To borrow an automotive phrase: "The bottleneck is the loose nut behind the wheel"
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
A. You don't know what you're talking about. You're saying that you prefer a DOS system over a VMS-based box. Wow.
B. Your problem is probably bad hardware. DOS is good at ignoring bad memory, and suck. NT/W2K is not very forgiving. You probably have really bad RAM and possibly, a screw HD.
C. It's pretty impossible for Win 98 to run faster than W2K, unless you had W2K configured to run about a thousand different things in the background.
D. You're about the only person that I've EVER heard saying that they have problems with W2K. Doesn't that say something about you?
E. Game support is irrelevant. W2K is designed for people who want to get stuff done.
It's funny when the ~12th comment posted to an article is redundant just because replies to earlier posts say the same thing only later in time-scale.
Okay, I'm done whining.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
One thing I'll say about XP (and this is grandly off-topic, but I got Karma to spare ;o)): ClearType kicks ass on LCD's.
:(
Strange that it is not enabled by default (I guess it may not look that good on a CRT), so if you have an XP box and haven't enabled it yet, try it. It's under Display Properties, Appearance, Effects...
Unfortunately no Open Source alternative for this yet... And unfortunately no time to create one either...
I hummbly appologize for such a pro-M$ comment here. At least the box dual-boots Redhat.
Well, you've got to look at what people want. Does average Joe User care that Office is going to load an extra quarter second faster on the new hardware, or would he rather see more pretty graphics. Definately the latter. But really, if you strip down W2K, and run it as a desktop, it IS incredibly fast when you're not running bloatware (ie: Office). But for the average user, the current speed of most big apps on current hardware is fine for them. They want more bells and whistles. Case in point. My text editor that I live with is TextPad. It hasn't changed much in the past few years, and when I run that on newer hardware on W2K, it absolutely screams. It's all in how you use it.
...when it comes to objectivity. I bet that half the people slamming XP have never even used it, let alone used for any extensive amount of time. I would put any one of my three WinXP Pro machines up against ANY Linux box on the same hardware. If I get to tune my XP box and ANY Linux biggot can tune the Linux box, I'll put my money on XP for any of the following (and more):
fastest initialization of:
1. any comparable web browser (IE vs. Moz or NS, not Lynx or something)
2. any comparable document editor (Word vs. StarOffice, not vi)
3. just about any real world task oriented operation
I will take XP any day.
The Win XP installation really dragged on my machine, probably because it was busy reformatting my Linux partitions.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Would it make a difference? It should, otherwise why pay $100 more for XP Professional?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Everybody wins. If many people were running Linux, there would be less need to keep pushing the Moore's law envelope. In that respect we should thank "Osama" Bill Gates :-) for writing bloated buggy code that requires a 2GHz processor, otherwise such machines would not have been developed, since Linux runs fine on a 400MHz PII
- written expediently (it must take a rational ammount of time for me to complete the work. I'm not Knuth, and I can't go on sabatical to do a treatise for this one feature)
- functional (it must work)
- maintainable - easy to change/fix and well documented or at least understandable
- fast (enough)
- last and least, it must be (somewhat) small.
Like most programmers, I pick a balance between these, but the thing I weigh least, is bloat. Small, tight, efficient (space and speed) code can be written, but programmers with speed and size as priorities often make misguided micro-optimizations that hinder priorities 1 and 3, and quite often 2. I find users prefer a program that crashes least.In the usual rush to post anything anti-MS, it appears to have been missed that the article states that WinXP & OfficeXP is slower than Win2K & Office2k.
The tests seem non-scientific at best. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to bash MS, this isn't one.
And on the topic of the gui changes there are some really good general usability improvements (top right pixel of screen is now part of the closed button on a maximimzed window, bottom left pixel now is part of the start button target), task based interface etc.
But if you want to compare speed do it apples to apples Office2k on Win2k and WinXP.
Why don't they say how much RAM was on the systems? That might explain the difference since XP is a real RAM hog. I compared a P4 1.5GHz XP system with 128 MB to one with 256 and the difference was obvious. No benchmarks, unfortunately since it was in the store, but geez - let's get *all* the facts before we draw conclusions.
as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how it works, and what it does
As a professional Windows software developer. Please, make the distinction. The quality of being a software developer does not somehow imply that, for some reason, one should know how Windows works. I'm a professional software developer myself and the last Windows I've seen was Windows 95 about 5 years ago in a totally non-programming related context. I don't even know what the rest of them look like.
As an engineer (who prefers a *nix environment) using a Windows desktop machine most of the day...I've found XP significantly faster than NT4.0 thus far. However, I can't comment on the Win2K comparison. I also thought highly enough of it to install at home for the wife and kids. Putting aside all of the MS-bashing, I think XP is pretty darn good.
Your monitor is staring at you.
Microsoft Exec: You Ididot!!!! You were supposed to use 'gcc -O2' not 'gcc -ggdb3'
Programmer: Im sorry! Ive been stealing too many GNU/MIT/BSD Code!
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You just have to laugh don't you, especially as I was just reading that 2.4 is faster than 2.2. You just HAVE to thank them for this don't you.
Thank You Microsoft, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You,
The title says it, I am very positively surprised by XP. Same machine, same applications, same everything and for example I get a performance boost in Java applications (like hushmail) that I can significantly feel. Working with it seems faster, too. The Taskbar is better (MUCH better), setting up the system was easy (except for the Intel 2100 Modem, which doesnt have XP drivers, so the 2K drivers have to work). The system seems to make better use of 384MB RAM, if I watch system monitors it seems to have a better swapping method. But this is all not very scientific. I believe if Infoworld says so that it _is_ slower. It certainly does not feel that way on a user level. It might be different if Id run a server here. ...
Thanks for reading these random thoughts
NT4 is quite nice for getting some (*gasp*) work done.
.. For getting my work done, W2k or XP offer practically nothing for me. Zilch.
Unexciting, yeah, but it practically never pukes on you as long as you have good drivers. I have had lock ups in single digits with NT4 boxes I've used at work for 3+ years.. Every time switching full-screen with command line, which is not what I ever do for work-work.
So
Let's face it. With the ridiculous performance and capacity gains that hardware makes, whether or not software is bloated or slow is not really an issue anymore. If it is, wait six months, and the hardware will be there that'll MAKE it a non-issue for the same cost as today's.
.NET specs. Witness the fact that they own the office and home desktop. And witness the fact that some of their subdivisions make some great stuff (Age of Empires, anyone?).
The software they make isn't really all that crappy anymore, either. Witness Carmack saying that the latest incarnations of DirectX are actually quite good. Witness the folks at Ximian breathlessly chasing Microsoft's
If we're going to criticize Microsoft, let's keep it above the belt. Go after their shady business practices or go after their pricey licences or go after the handcuffs of dealing with proprietary formats, protocols and libraries. These are really the only three things that you can still legitimately criticize Microsoft on these days, and they're worthy enough topics to explore.
But covering our mouths and giggling because some guy got 11% less performance with one over the other? Come on...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Sounds like you've either got faulty hardware or a faulty stopwatch, pal.
If you had to get a engineering degree in to program, we would have a lot better code out there.
LOL! Do you have any idea how many people are walking around with BSCS degrees, who can't even tell you why qsort beats a bubble sort?
Code is the only cred that matters.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
I went to eTesting Labs, CNET and ZDNET, while all do have tons about XP, i could not find any benchmarks, could you point me the right direction?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Wow.. I bet you're an engineer.. And I bet they told you in school how evolutionarily superior you were to simple 'computer science' students, to the point where you even started using the quotation marks on your own.. What it comes down to is libraries.. lots and lots of libraries.. People aren't computers.. Existance isn't inherently logical... We can only approximate existance using logical steps, 1's and 0's.. and we need lots of shiny colours, animated transitions, synthesized orchestral hits and icons in order to associate anything meaningfull with these inhuman machines.. I have an engineering background.. I also have a computer science background.. The thing that bothered me about engineering is.. wait for it.. the 'God complex'. Don't believe the hype; we're all just doing what we can so that we can find our places in the world. There isn't some inferior race of Epsilon minuses being churned out by Computer Science facultys througout North America.. Just people who want to try and put their own piece of humanity on a cd.. Denying that anything less is the point of these souless machines is kind of silly and when it comes down to it.. quite incorrect. But I'm probably wrong, and you're probably right and I'll just go back to writing my windows app..
I remember running Corel DRAW in Windows 3.11 on a 386 with 4 MB RAM. When Windows 95 was released, MS said it was faster and more optimised than Windows 3.11. When Windows 98 was released, they said it was faster and more optimised than Windows 95. Same goes for Windows Me and now XP. If all this is true, then why is it that if I try to start Windows XP on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM it won't even make it past the M$ logo...? And if my CPU is 100 times as fast, why does everthing take more or less the same time?
By now it should be using a negative amount of memory and running on a Z80!
I've never had 95, 98 or Me installed on any of the computers I use regularly. I went from DOS to NT (3.51, then 4.0) and now 2000 Pro. And each of these changes was made for a reason.
From DOS to NT because of the native multitasking and GUI (and because some programs had become Windows-only).
From NT to 2000 for the plug-&-Play and because of DX (ie, games).
Now the question when considering the upgrade to XP is not "will it be much worse?", but rather "will it be much better?". What's the point in paying for an upgrade, installing everything all over again, going back to beta drivers, etc., if, in the end, you end up with something that's almost identical to what you had in the first place?
Why is it that whenever journalists talk about Windows or Microsoft, they say things like, "HOPELESS OPTIMISM must be a fundamental part of human nature, because we want to believe that new operating systems truly represent an improvement on their predecessors," when they are talking about Windows. Why do they represent it as a generalization when there is only one example that they have any experience with? Other parts of the article are funny too, but I just wanted to voice a pet peeve.
The ocean parts and the meteors come down
Laid out in amber, baby.
I was running Win2k on my HPVLI8 here at work (you can look up the specs at hp's web site). I recently added another HD and installed XP with the Plus pack, and Office XP. My 2k partition was running Off. XP as well. I have 256MB of mem installed, to speed things up a bit (they come with 128).
Well, let me tell you how disapointed I was. The XP partition is slower than *anything* I have used before. The article is bang on the money, but doesn't mention a video card *anywhere*! I have the same configuration at home (with a 32 Meg D3D card, pIII 533, 655MB RAM) and it just purrs. Fast boot, fast shutdown, everything. My only complaint is with IE 6. It sucks. If I get any more of those "Do you wish to Debug?" windows I'm gonna lose it.
If you're in charge of purchasing, and you're reading this...upgrade to 2k. Not XP.
Linux is going in the complete opposite direction of Windows and getting faster with each version. If Linux is going to compete with Windows it better start getting slow, and getting slow fast!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
is not enabled by default, at least on my machine. I don't know though, since I have two NICs it couldn't complete the automatic network setup wizard.. maybe that wizard enables remote desktop. you may be thinking of the remote assistance function where you can invite a friend or MS tech support to control your computer.. that has to be initiated by you though.
Independently of the big three automakers, ExxonMobile says, "We objectively consider the newest crop of SUVs to be the most wonderful ever, and urge their immediate purchase by all."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I agree, I put on a test system here at work. It felt faster.
I hate to say anthing nice about M$, but, XP seemed much faster on a PII 350 with 256 then Win2K. I wonder why? subjectivly at least it DID seem faster.Enough that I bought it for my computer at for the kids to play thier games on.
Now if it only ran half the games for my kids I bout it for I would be content.Any one else able to play reading rabbit on XP?
"think of it as evolution in action"
One of the MS guys posted a summary of Win2K vs. WinXP performance to one of the XP beta newsgroups, which I probably can't quote here (the NDA's expired now that XP's out, but I think newsgroup postings are still supposed to be kept private). It's message ID <#wiDogDGBHA.564@CPMSBNEWSW03.betanews.com> for any of you who have access to the XP beta newsgroups.
But to paraphrase, he said that:
- XP boots much faster than 2K.
- XP resumes from standby and from hibernate faster than 2K.
- XP generally launches apps faster than 2K from a cold start. 2K is a bit faster if the app's been launched before and is cached.
- Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2001: XP is generally faster on modern machines (700MHz+ CPU, 128MB+ RAM, 16MB+ VRAM, 30GB+ disk). 2K is generally faster than XP on slower machines.
- Webmark 2001: pretty much a tie. XP might be a tad faster.
- Sysmark 2001: pretty much a tie. 2K might be a tad faster.
- PC Worldbench 2000: 2K is faster by default. But if you turn off "Fade or slide menus into view" and "Show shadows under menus", XP will beat 2K. If you "Adjust for best performance" XP beats 2K by a wide margin.
- I-Bench: 2K will probably win, but they haven't run it in a while.
- OfficeBench: They've never tried it, but apparently anandtech has some numbers. (And I guess now InfoWorld has some too). He does mention that it doesn't test disk I/O, which is one of the areas where XP has significant improvements, so he sees it as a fairly narrow benchmark.
Anyways, the guy's posting was quite informative and got into some of the tech details...The only feature I'd like from XP in Windows 2000 (which I use at work) is cleartype. Maybe Microsft will "plus-pack" Win2k, or include it in a service pack...
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Many people brag about performance and what not and everything I have read refutes this infoworld article.
What about how a user actually works with the machine.
Check out this for a look at a usability study conducted on doing common tasks with the computer. XP was tons easier to use and will save real time for users.
Hell,
What options are there for people who need to run Windows? There is NT and 2000 which come with stability but have their own set of quirkiness and complexity to learn. Then there is the 9x series (including ME). These aren't stable at all. What do I recommend?
Well, as a computer science major, you soon become the "friend" that everyone calls during computer troubles. After years of this, I reluctantly recommend XP. Fuck 11 percent. Its not worth some poor soul calling me at 11pm because they've never seen scandisk before. Sure - Microsoft has built themselves into these sales, "our other OS'es suck or are too complex for you so buy XP" - but what else can you recommend?
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While all these open source companies were busy making whatever (*), Microsoft was fixing what had gone wrong in desktop land. As far as I am concerned, the WinXP interface - good and bad - should be the new GUI system standard for all desktop-targetted Linux distros. There is currently too much of a learning curve to warrant development of anything else and expect nothing short of non-penetration onto the desktop.
(*) Although I am impressed with the advances of Linux, I cannot see how any consumer could ever use it without significant improvements to the UI.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I have been using it for three weeks and I disagree with this. Win2K is much slower on my .NET stuff is annoying as well. There are strengths, and there are drawbacks. I do like the built in file decompression, which I am sure WinZIP and other such programs are not liking one bit. I didn't have to download a program at all to open a compressed file. So, there are good and bad things, but I don't agree that Win2K is faster. It just isn't on my system configuration.
hardware, and I am using a AMD 650 with 256 megs of RAM on. My Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and Office apps load more quickly, and I have yet to
have a problem with squandered resources, EXCEPT from Outlook Express 6, which has crashed quite a few times. The networkinf stuff is slick, and
sets itself up, and I mean it literally sets itself up. I have moved this harddrive between work and home, and it configures itself for the network each time, and Ihave had no hardware issues doing this either. Now, I do think it is bloated, and Windows Messenger that you must edit your registry to even have the option to remove it is evil, especially when the thing opens when Outlook Express opens no matter WHAT you have it set to do. The
The "slowness" of Windows XP has been one of the biggest arguments against it, but what people don't realize is that if you turn off all the funky effects, it's just as fast as win2k. Added to the new drivers, as you've mentioned, and the fast user-switching , XP is a godsend. If you need to run some version of windows, and money isn't an issue, get XP.
So what if it's just a benchmark of Office XP? That one application suite (including a full version of Outlook) is easily the most widely used application - almost everyone uses it at least some of the time, many people use it almost exclusively.
This means a benchmark of this application *alone* is still extremely useful, precisely because it will affect everyone. Performance elsewhere might be much better, but you would need to see *major* improvement in a lot of places to offset an 11% tax on the most common app.
As for the argument that the performance hit is offset by increased reliability... that's a hard call to make. This will certainly help people who have problems with the system locking up, but what about people who already have acceptable reliability via rebooting their system nightly?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
From my experience, WinXP is faster than Win2k. I can also say that if you take off the Luna interface it runs even faster, not by much though. I have installed it on about 20 machines, and were talking about ten different types of hardware, including Laptops. I have only run into one problem, which with fixed with a bios update from dell. I agree that it is more bloated than Win2k, and the others, but who in their right mind would try to install XP, or even 2k on a machine with sub 128MB and a 500mhz processor. Those people should stick to Linux or Win(crash)9X, and leave Microsoft alone about their new baby. Either that or fork out the $300 and get yourself a Thunderbird 1.2Ghz/Motherboard combo with a half gig of ram and bring yourself into the modern world. What else does the Monopoly have to do to satisfy all of the people they assimilate? They did a damn good job with 2k which is rock solid, and XP is even better with more compatibility. For once they have put out a stable release. I hate the registration thingy though. Nothing a little crack cant fix. Anyways, that is my two cents, and "LET THE FLAMES BEGIN!" Honer
I have been saved 3 times by system restore. Each time I tried to add certain CD burning software on my laptop I would get bluescreens. The rollback feature allowed me to "backdate" my sytstem, thus saving me the time of a complete reinstall. Since it takes me almost a day to rebuild a system to my liking I guess it's worth it. I suspevt that the system restore might be what is slowing XP down. I mean NTFS is always journaling so I guess part of the hit is there. I just throttled down the GUI to the "best performace" setting on the laptop and its not bad. It seems to get hung up on backround tasks like compacting my usenet reader. MY desktop has 2 P III's so no complaints there. The other big time saver was putting it on the kids machine at home. I have a 12, 9 and 4 year old and haven't been able to crash it yet.
When was the last time _any_ major release of a consumer OS got faster when it was revved up a version?
(I'm not counting MacOS X 10.0.x - 10.1, as the 10.0.x series was basically an early adopter beta version disguised as release)
But any version of Windows ever as far as I can remember, any version of Classic MacOS, even Linux for the most part, though individual packages and subsystems may be sped up as they mature, the overall OS usually gets more and more bloated with time. If you take Windows 2000, optimize it, but then pile on a bunch more cruft on top, of course the overall product will slow down.
Software expands to fill all the available hardware plus approximately 10%. Operating systems are partular offenders (and bloated office suites).
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
In the interests of consumers I think I set of standards on maximum and minimum standards needs to be defined for software. This would define the minimum hardware which would be required to run an application as well as the most powerful hardware that should be expected.
eg.
Office applications, web-browsing, email : 200-400mhz, 32-128meg ram, 1-6gig harddrive
Games are a different matter entirely.
Of course hardware companies (and software companies that depend of OEM contracts) would hate this, but I did say it would be good for consumers.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
>sigh
C|Net disagrees.
Intrestingly enough WinInfo predicted this sort of response. Look under the title "InfoWorld Disses Windows XP: Who Do You Trust?" to see how the other half lives.
I wish these "OS reviews" were as in-depth as the gaming site's card and driver reviews. Both the C|Net and Infoworld reviews leave me with more questions they answer.
Less Talk, More Beer.
I realize that I am not the most standard benchmark I'll throw in my comments.
I've been using Win2K for about 6 months and I just installed WinXP (Home Edition) a few days ago. So far, I see really no performance difference either good or bad. It's much prettier and there are some nice new features that I'm glad to have. Nothing special either way.
Was it worth the $199? Probally. There is some stuff in it that makes my life a lot easier.
The article states, clearly, that they turned off all of the eye candy and XP was still painfully slower. Hard, cold facts are hard to argue with.
XP sure is purty, tho.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
First of all, you can't log into a SAMBA hosted NT domain unless you muddle with a registry setting that is hidden (I forget the details).
Secondly, the transfer speed is laughable. I went from ~1000K/s on the box to **** 93K/s **** after installing XP (yes
I gotta love how Windows zealots call Linux zealots zealots!
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
I'm not going to argue over the 11%. It may or may not be true but let's assume it IS true for a minute.
A user spends most of his/her time writing emails and documents, surfing the net etc. where the computer more or less idles all of the time. Even if a certain operation is 11% slower, you can't extrapolate it over the course of the day and come up with a figure of 53 minutes. I'm sorry but that's just idiotic. Most users will lose a few seconds per day over this! If there's even a small increase in productivity due to other things like, let's say clearer and simplified dialogs, faster access to your documents due to thumbnails in the file manager or something similar, it MORE than makes up for the lost couple of seconds.
Articles like this are really pathetic. You know, you don't HAVE to post something negative about Microsoft EVERY day.
By the way, my guess would be that Microsoft looked at all the bad press they were getting re: I LOVE YOU virus, et al, and for Windows XP, they took the WSH 5.1 engine, went through it, and added a full stack walk to every single call that touched a system call, to verify that no malicious code would run.
Those who would trade a little bit of performance for a little bit of security deserve neither.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
I've got a dual boot 2000/XP machine at work and XP uses less resources and is faster on almost everything. The only exception is games. XP blows away 2000. My Counterstrike fps went from 72 in ME to 45 in 2000 where as XP it only dropped to 69 fps (at home not at work where i have the same setup). And if any morons cant figure out how to get around a MS GUI they are dumber than I thought was possible. Windows is significantly easier to use than Linux.
With that said I'm in the process of porting all my companies server apps to tomcat (from asp/iis) b/c i'm not going to get locked in to the MS Licensing bullshit. They really fucked up with that BSA stuff.
However, since my clients are fucking morons i'm going to have to keep them on windows. Sad really, but it's their money not mine.
Having worked in the publishing field years ago, I can tell you that the so-called wall between advertising revenue and editorial content was already near-transparent by the late eighties, and the publications you mention who gush over the latest/greatest advertised goods accept mucho dinero from Redmond.
On the anecdotal evidence side, I've been running betas and RTMs of Windows XP for a while on multiple platforms and can't see much to recommend it as an upgrade for speed or stability. I keep hearing posts boasting the latter, but a properly tuned/tweaked & maintained Win98SE box will scream compared to either Windows 2000 or Windows XP, and although I'd prefer using the NT kernel if I'm forced onto a Microsoft platform instead of Unix I can't in good conscience recommend the extra cost since so many apps demand running with admin rights anyway.
Im running XP in my laptop, its alot faster then 2000 was. sure not as ast as win 98 or win 95, but it has ALOT more features. If I didnt feel those features were worth it, I wouldnt have installed it. there was no gun to my head.
Chris Lee
lee@mediawaveonline.com
IBM did some benchmarks about 3 weeks ago, claiming that Linux has the biggest pipe for IPC. If you look at the results, you will notice how much slower XP is to w2k. Linux out preformed both by quite a bit. So, I belive what they are saying.
:)
I know someone who did an install of w2k on a P-90 w/ 40 MB RAM and it ran fairly well for the speed of the machine. Installing XP was a greatly decrease in speed, to the point where it was unusable. This isn't the best benchmark using outdated hardware like a P-90, but, it proves my point.
I am happy to stick with Linux
Here is the slashdot article on it.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Printers and shares now remember the passwords.
Umm. That's a bad thing, not a good thing. Do you know if that can be turned off?
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
i've used XP for a few weeks now, and overall like it. The only problem with it that I've found is that it can get very slow when a few programs are accessing a single hard drive. This slows down the system and just creates a lot of lag. This did not happen in 98 as much, but it is extreamly stable, so I can wait a few extra seconds instead of having to reboot twice a day. Also, can anyone find out how to make sure DMA is turned on for the hard drives? I tried, but windows says it controls it and doesn't let the user at it.
Well, if you don't like the UI Windows has, you can always use litestep. Unless you're afraid of doing something simple like that, too...
[insert witty comment here]
I have been using XP on one of my comps for a little while now and it does deffinately slow down normal apps, but In games I have seen a slight rate increase. So who knows...
Have you tried networking with a SAMBA box? It blows.
If WinXP's network code is fast with all the supported uses (for example, using an NT SMB server rather than SAMBA), and is only slow when using SAMBA, don't you think perhaps the conclusion that SAMBA's SMB interoperability is broken is more reasonable than the conclusion that XP's is?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That wasn't a troll you brain dead moderator. It's truthful and factual and informative. Just because you may not like the fact that it shines a good light on something MS related doesn't give you the right to try to censor this information. Information wants to be free - censorship is wrong. Censoring the facts is wrong. Moderation is censorship when it's used incorrectly.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was true -- but regardless, I hate Microsoft for this simple reason: They're more interested in making money than imporivng their software. Quantity of profit will always override quality of product. They are more interested in pushing their product than in caring whether it's actually better.
These are real benchmarks that eat up alot more resources then stupid office tasks which even a pentium1 can do. Notice win98SE is the fastest here but winXP and w2k are neck to neck. A frame or 2 per second is not noticable and winXP does have some great support for firewire and digital camera's. Its great for people who pay for their os's but bad for pirates. :-)
MY only compliant is product activation of course. But on my Pentiuum III with 192 megs of ram, XP is noticably faster then w2k rc1. Its just more responsive as well.
http://saveie6.com/
They have hardly made a "major change" to the user interface. It's basically plain ol' Win2k with a WindowBlinds theme slapped on top. If you are not familiar with WindowBlinds, check out Stardock's website. If I recall, WindowBlinds worked merely by covering up the existing titlebar and buttons on each window. I believe that the "old-school" Windows interface is still drawn and then WindowBlinds slaps another layer on top of it. I was HORRIFIED when I first installed Windows XP RC2. The "improved" interface looked like a big blue and green crap. Luckily, it's easy to defeat. There will be more themes available in the near future, but so what? It's nothing like Apple's beautifully done OS X. Apple completely redesigned everything, obviously spending alot of time. Win XP's "new" interface was a quick and dirty hack, started years ago by the creators of WindowBlinds. It's no surprise really that even Microsoft's latest and greatest OS uses technology taken from someone else. Hopefully they paid more for it than they paid for DOS.
I honestly have to wonder how many more of these stories Rob is going to continue submitting on this same line of articles. We have seen over the last year or so a steady increase in these kinds of articles by standard Slashdot Editors, and I have read a strong increase in support for Microsoft on Slashdot, strangely enough. I don't mean to imply that all or even most of Slashdot's readership is MS-biased, but I think Malda is letting his own bias show. Most Engineers who get frustrated with a particluar release of any software package vent by the water cooler, but I think Malda is venting via the articles he chooses, which shows a poor display of bias.
XP Launch
MS FrontPage
MS Loses Delay Appeal
Whether or not this post is modded up, I hope CmdrTaco takes notice that while he has founded and continues to heavily influence one of the best Tech-News Sites ever made, he needs to keep some kind of restraint. I'm not defending MS, but rather trying to promote the idea that you don't sit around all day and bash something you don't even use. I could understand if Malda was teased all day for running Linux in a Windows Shop, but I would guess that it's typically the other way around. When was the last time you even saw XP in person, Taco? or 2000? I don't post criticisms about the drivability of Ferarris and Saabs, or even Peugots- why? Because I have contact with them, and I don't consider myself to be anywhere near an authority on them. Maybe this kind of consideration should be taken to newer windows products with some of the Slashdot editors.
See - it popped up the error dialog box faster!
So it must be better!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I'm not shocked, not even surprised...actually I'd have been rather more surprised if it were XP which was the faster OS.
Not to wax nostalgic, but PC-Write on DOS 4.01 and a 10 MHz (Turbo mode) 8088 had no noticeable latency while typing. In fact most of its non-disk operations were essentially simultaneous. Word under Win 3.1 had noticeable delays with most everything it did. Win 95 and Word 97 slowed things down further. Heck, Gecko was _much_ faster than Mozilla m.95, so it happens in open source as well. I am often told that "If you had the latest hardware it would be fast!". Alas, I've never been able to verify that. But, it seems to me that if you have to upgrade hardware to experience the same speed, then the software _is_ slower...
Perhaps it runs slower on purpose to encourage people to buy new computers? Then new computers with XP have code built in where it doesn't run as slow? Its all a big conspiracy you know. :)
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Well, at least kinda. Or so I do understand the claims, that they hope that XP is going to give the IT sector a tremendous boost. If it really is that slow - or if it really requires that much better hardware - then, in fact, it might give a boost to the hardware manufactures.
That's how I understand MS....
Alexander Skwar -- Homepage: http://www.digitalprojects.com | http://www.iso-top.de iso-top.de - Die
Thought I'd post this link, since nobody else has:
The windows.com version is here: Lab Report: Windows XP Outperforms Earlier Versions.
And the msn version. See the links "benchmark" and "performance". Notice the msn.zdnet.com link. Can somebody clear what the relationship between ZD and MS for me?
-Kraft
Live and let live
Xtra Pokey...
It should also be of note that in these so-called "pathological" cases, bubble sort may quite probably beat out quicksort. It depends on the implementation, but bubble sort will generally sort an already sorted list in O(n) time; quicksort will do it in O(nlogn) at best, and probably O(n^2) (if the pivot is chosen as the first element, as is usually the case).
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
But it seems that XP is going there performance-wise... Maybe it's the fact that they keep adding "new features" to old products and expecting them to be faster? The amount of code in XP mus tbe tremendous, since they ARE building on old systems, tweaking here and there, but essentially keeping the same framework...
:)
Maybe MS will catch on one day, and decide to write something that truly is "new and improved" from scratch; maybe linux really will have a "run for it's money" then... until then, I think the marketshare is going to leaving Billy-Bob's side of the pie.
PS- Just imagine all the "new and improved" worms and virii that will come out of the new XP code... Should be tons of fun!! I'm glad I'm working mainly on linux systems now!
This is my Sig.
Besides all of the new 'media' enhancements to XP, this is not the primary cause of it's larger size. One of the biggest contributors is Windows File Protection or WFP. WFP keeps a second copy of all important operating system files, especially dll's, and is prepared to replace and important files that are replaced by other programs. Hopefully this will do a lot to solve dll hell. Secondly, XP keeps a copy of the driver cache so you don't have to locate the CD to install new hardware. This will also help to make the system truly plug and play, which I think is very important for things like digital cameras ect. Drive space is really a non-issue with 40gig drives selling for less than $100
Overall, XP is a really nice OS. You can't pass off the interface as 'fisher-price' because after a quick retraining period, I find it much faster. As far as the article itself, the only flaw I could suggest is a driver issue in the hardware tested. I barely noticed any speed differences between 2000 and Xp to even make it an issue. While some may scoff(sp?) at the passport idea, I believe many people will will benefit from it over 3rd-party products in the arena of purchasing photo prints ect. You can argue that 3rd-party tools are available but from my experience with the normal computer user, they won't even bother. One thing that impresses me the most partly because I'm biased, is the benchmarks results for SMP systems. This sort of SMP performance seems to be a real plus for SMP systems as a whole (which is probably where we should be headed).
Overall, I think it's a wonderful OS compared to 98, and if there are performance issues, they will be resolved considering the enormous similiarity of 2000 and XP. Contrary to popular /. belief, XP is an issue to linux...
If WinXP's network code is fast with all the supported uses (for example, using an NT SMB server rather than SAMBA), and is only slow when using SAMBA, don't you think perhaps the conclusion that SAMBA's SMB interoperability is broken is more reasonable than the conclusion that XP's is?
argh. microsoft has repeatedly broken samba compatibility for no other discernable reason other that to break samba compatibility (most recently, win2k sp2). of course we can all imagine why microsoft feels motivated to do so, but that doesn't fault the samba developers. which isn't to say that samba isn't at fault in this case, but precedent certainly would lead most to look to microsoft initially as the cause.
It is quite possible that whatever compatibility box is run to allow creeky Win95 programs to still work would slow the system.
It is also quite possible that the hardware used was running Win98 drivers under XP which is going to cause a performance hit.
Most likely however is that the benchmarks don't measure the things XP is optimized for. XP is a personal user O/S. As such you would expect the apparent speed of the O/S to be optimized rather than the actual time taken to run compute heavy Excel spreadsheets.
A more reasonable test would be to measure the speed of running Quake or Civ III on the two platforms.
I don't much care about the speed of the machine, what I really care about is the amount of time I spend waiting while the machine is busy. My main frustrations with both X-Windows and MS Windows are the times when I am waiting for the window manager to catch up with what I am doing.
I don't much care about tasks that normally take 5 minutes taking 6 minutes. But I do care about a popup box responding in 100ms rather than 10 seconds. I do care about the times when the UI freezes because some application has locked some resource it has no business messing with.
That said, the benchmark will no doubt be used in the usual highly partisan manner to 'prove' that Linux is best on the basis of a comparison between two versions of windows. After all the weenie faction did (and are) doing exactly that last week when Amazon moved from Compaq Tru64 to Linux
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I am usually a Microsoft basher, but if the XP OS is more stable, the theoretical performance difference will not matter, since it will more than be made up for by not loosing work, rebooting, etc... Faster processors will fix any performance difference in less than 6 months. No processor fix is possible to prevent the Blue Screen of Death.
Letter To Iran
Did they mention that a feature is "Your applications will crash faster than ever before allowing you to get less done in more time!". I think I saw this as a splash during the installation and I can verify this because a good portion of my game library has been rendered useless by XP (even when using the so-called "Compatability Wizard" - should be called the Blue Screen of Death Wizard). XP is to 2000 as Me was to 9X, except with a much bigger ad campaign. That, and a severely weakened recovery wizard (a broken console or the Automatic Recovery System which doesn't work) really adds to the flavor. Windows 2000 is probably MS's peak operating system.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
Not only is it the most widely used, it is easily the only reason many businesses even bother with Microsoft. We'll see if they stick with that once the forced upgrades and rental plans start rolling around...
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
That link was supposed to be http://chroniclesofgeorge.nanc.com/
/. doesn't like the TARGET="_blank" =)
Guess
Ran windows 2000 on that machine. Installed XP, re-installed everything. Plugged in a USB device (SansDisk CF reader), Windows eXport Privacy freezed (hourglass on and on), Cont-Alt-Del did not work, No process/org can be killed.
.. still freeze.
Left for Halloween party. Returned at 2am
Reboot!
MoeJoe,
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." You're really stretching it here. Think about it.
And "shocking claim"? Oh please! The Win95 to Win95b to Win98 to WinME series established a very noticable pattern of Windows getting slower. Right ore wrong, how could this story possibly be shocking? I smell posers.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Certainly I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to do something like that, but they do retain backwards compatibility with old NT SMB servers, so at the very least SAMBA is not yet a perfect clone of NT SMB servers. Not that this is necessarily the SAMBA developers' fault, as their code emulated all necessary features of SMB up until now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I must say, I'm impressed by how many biased sources that you cited. Well, actually, that the citation that you cited cited, but what the hell. You picked it.
/. doesn't have the highest S/N ratio any more, how are their enough people to think that your quote was good enough to be read at a +5? Grammar school children routinely write better material.
"Not only do the controversial InfoWorld results fly in the face of Microsoft's published results..."
Personally, I feel that this one line discredits anything that the pundit in question could say about the subject. The most important benchmarks of a product are not those of the entity selling the product. It's absolutely absurd to even mention microsoft's benchmarks since they're very obviously biased (it's even worse because microsoft is a company known for lying). This demonstrates a complete lack of understanding as to how real knowledge is gained, i.e. no understanding of the scientific process at all.
"and actual real-world use"
This is better than asking microsoft, but it's still very subjective, and worse it gives no indication of whose real-world use is being referenced. Hell, if you ask the right people you can get real-world opinions that Christina Aguilera has a nice voice.
"hey refute every independent XP performance test performed to date."
As a minor nit, they can't refute *every* independent XP performance test, as they don't refute themselves. They refute every *other* independent XP test (unless someone claims that microsoft funded this test and decided to publish the results). This, however, is just a nit and not relevent. This part would be fine if it wasn't deprecated in the sentence that it was in. As it is, you seriously have to wonder at the intellectual prowess of those who consider the least important data to be the data that comes from independent tests.
"CNET/ZDNET, eTesting Labs, eWeek, PC Magazine, and PC World."
Well, ZFnet gets a large portion of its revenue from microsoft (in advertising), so calling them independent is a bit of stretch. eTesting Labs is owned by ZD, and thus they, if indirectly, stand to gain from pleasing microsoft. eWeek is a Ziff Davis company as well! PC Magazine is yet another ZD company. In point of fact the only company on this list that isn't a Ziff Davis company is PC World, who is owned by IDG. So all of these independent labs are owned by two companies. Honestly, when 4 out of 5 independent labs that you mention are all owned by the same company, it doesn't really reinforce your point very well.
"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."
How do we know this? Were these hundreds of thousands of people polled by an independent polling organization? Are these results publically available?
"'Microsoft has not received any indications that users are experiencing reduced performance compared with Windows 2000,' a company spokesperson said."
This is a joke, right? What exactly would microsoft say, "Yes, we have been getting a very large volume of complaints that the latest version of our product isn't even as good as the previous version"
"'We have had extensive feedback that Windows XP is better performing than Windows 9x.' Go figure."
This guy really should have listened to himself. The company spokesperson says that they've been hearing that the latest version of their software is better than their 4-6 year old products. Who would have thought that we'd live to see a thing like that happen. I bet, if you ask, that a Pepsi Co spokesperson would say that they've recieved extensive feedback that pepsi tastes better than coke. And it is not outside the realm of possibility that Goerge Bush would say that America is the greatest nation on the earth. Or that you could find a Ford spokesperson who would tell you that this year's model of the explorer is better than the one from four years ago. If you've missed the material point: any sane person could have told you that the spokesperson would say something more or less like this. Even if winXP got half the performance of win9.x, they'd almost certainly still be saying this.
"Looks like he hit that nail right on the head, huh?"
Yeah, I think that he did, in so far as he predicted that anti-microsoft sites would publish this. Of course, anyone could have told you this. As for the rest of it, what you quoted of his article is pretty worthless as far as actually convincing anyone of a point goes.
However, my point was simply to mention how badly this quote does in terms of making an argument and backing it up with convincing arguments. I know that
All this being said, the main point of my post is for the other people reading it: it's worthwhile actually checking the facts offered by people. For example, I wouldn't have guessed that 4 out of 5 of the "independent testers" mentioned above were all owned by the same company.
I guess that it just points out how much slashdot has changed - prettymuch any pro-microsoft post written in halfway decent english (i.e. without significant profanity) gets modded through the roof around here.
Heck, I'll probably get modded down for defying the majority around here by not praising micrsoft and/or claiming to be defying the majority when I'm actually towing the party line.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Since when has the latest version of Windows NOT been slower than the previous version?
:)
If you want to have some fun, throw Windows 3.1 on a P4 with at least 128 MB RAM, and turn on a stock car race on the nearest TV for some sound-effect fun. Proceed to operate computer
-Chardish
...that the editors post all the time? Seriously? It used to be that the editors were reasonable, but nowadays they're worse than the trolls sometimes.
/. if the editors would stop giving their opinions of things in the story text and logged in as themselves and posted like a regular user. It would sure increase the respect that editors get.
And it would greatly improve the quality of
Right now it honestly seems like the editors' job is primarily to insense flaim wars and troll posting to drive up banner views.
If you want to improve the quality of discussion, start by at least keeping flaims, trolls, and other things of similar quality out of the story blurbs. They're generally only one paragraph long - it shouldn't be too hard.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
If you've ever noticed stories about windows software, especially games, Taco frequently mentions, or at least used to mention, that he liked playing it. Basically, he ran windows all the time for games.
/. machines. Prettymuch all one call tell that he does is play windows games and troll as an editor on his child which has so completely outgrown him.
/., I'd probably cry for him. It's a pretty depressing situation, when you think about it.
Taco is a huge hypocrit as far one can tell from the public, and all his anti-MS speach is just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's almost guaranteed that he runs one of winXp, win2K, or winME. Maybe all three.
Taco doesn't troll the way he does because he's one of the linux elite. They don't troll except as private jokes among those they know. Taco is just an insecure guy who is famous because his website was in the right place at the right time. He hasn't earned his fame like linus or alan or Bruce or Eric or RMS. He's just as conspicuous, but noone can really point to anything worthwhile of even moderate difficulty that he's done himself. The slashdot code stopped being his a long time ago. He doesn't administrate the
So really, pity Taco. If it weren't for the hugely negative impact he has on
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
They didn't make a 'change' to their GUI. They made the title bars and green and poofy, the start button green and poofy, and the start menu bigger. Good lord! And you can have themes for explorer!! Innovation, revolution!
Juln
there was a typo in one of the header files
#define V_IBM 0x0001 - should have been 0x0002
#define V_MS 0x0001
if (vendor == V_IBM) {
for (x=0; x 10000; x++);
}
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I upgraded my box from w2k to XP just a few days ago, and it was worth it just for my games.... Stuff that didn't even THINK about running in 2000 runs fine in XP (like some older EA games and stuff that refuses to run under NT) To me it was well worth it. (altho I type all my documents in vim and process them in Latex, becuase that's what we do at work ;)
I'm an AIX Systems administrator, and yes I do cry myself to sleep at night....
2001-11-01 06:48:17 Windows XP slow slow slow (articles,news) (rejected)
got me buggered.
Seems to me that InfoWorld is either the only credible news source left in the tech world or there is something inherently wrong in their tests... just seeing how every other test (independent or not) of XP has shown that it is generally faster than 2000 and ME. Yes it lags behind somewhat on some tests, it speeds ahead on others, but for the most part it performs on par or slightly better than its counterparts. I also heard no complaints from beta testers and, now, owners of XP about the OS's speed. In fact I'm running the bare minimum configuration many have suggested for XP, a PII 350MHz with 128MB SDRAM, and XP runs circles around 2000 (well at least when I'm playing a little UT).
I noticed near the beggining of the posts that some thought that the XP interface was so different from the previous versions (and the same for all versions compared to the previous version) that users would have to be retrained on the OS. This seems to contradict with the same group of people attacking XP and Windows in general for NOT chaning the UI enough or adding more "true" functionality to it. Can't have it both ways folks... and those that I know who have used it, actually find it alot more intuitive than any version before it... well save some of my old OS2 stalwarts.
Rock solid? 99% of the time?
That's interesting, I've seen almost the exact opposite results. I run a dual PIII 1Ghz with 512MB of RAM, which should make short of just about anything, but Windows XP runs like an absolute dream on it, even compared to Windows 2000. It's difficult to compare, though, as everyday as I continue to use the few select applications I use, they get increasingly faster. VS.NET, the first few times I started it, would take upwards of 10 seconds to completely load. Now it's nearly instantaneous. How do you benchmark an OS that constantly re-orders files on disk and library loading to optimize for frequently executed programs? They really should try running the systems side by side with normal duties for a few weeks, then compare.
Laugh all you want. It sells software.
I have an old laptop. When I say old, I mean really, really old. It's a Pentium-233, with 96 megs of RAM. That's basically the minimum requirements to even run Windows XP, but I still wanted to get rid of Windows 95 which it had been running. So I picked up a free copy of XP from the office and installed it. It installed quickly and easily, and the first bootup was quicker than expected. After turning off the new gui (blue & green taskbar?? Are you kidding?), it ran quite quickly. There is no slowdown compared to Win95, in fact in many situations it seems to be considerably faster than 95 on this machine. Bear in mind, of course, that this is the bare minimum processor and just above the minimum RAM, and there is a considerably performance increase over Windows 95. Amazing.
I think we should all applaud Microsoft. Say what you will about them, but they still manage to release a huge new update to their OS at least once a year (how old are Win2k and Me? And now XP is already out), and every one is better than the last. XP is definitely worth the upgrade, even if you only have the bare minimum.
On a personal note, as I write this I'm running a Big-O test on one of my programs, and the OS dynamically allocates processor time to the program on the fly, and there are no performance hits to the real-time programs. Glancing at the task-manager shows that the profiled program is always taking up 86-95% of the processor, but nothing seems slower than it normally does. Incredible.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
What many of the /. fail to recognize is that very few people care very much about the slashdot editors. We all hope that you do well and are happy and all that, but your opinions aren't very relevent. People come to slashdot for the community, not for the (apparently randomly selected) club of editors.
/. sends the message loud and clear that what's wanted is controversy, not discussion.
/. - remember that you need signal in order to have a signal/noise ratio. Right now virtually everything is noise, even at +4. You might want to look into encouraging people to post worthwhile comments, as well as trying to figure out how to mod trolls into oblivion. (i.e. start with the most obvious trolls - the /. editors)
It's your site so you get to do what you want, but if you want good discussion, sticking dumb polarizing messages that often shape discussion up at the top really doesn't help generate good discussion.
That's the problem. It's not whether or not you're biased - it's whether or not you want good discussion. Right now,
Right now the editors use their positions as editors to inflate the value of their opinions. Basically, the editors so far are not competent at leading worthwhile discussions, so it would really be for the best if you resisted the temptation to get on your soapbox and just posted stories.
Especially considering how dumb and childish many of the editorials are, and the first comment that users can't turn off will inevitable set the tone.
And since you know that given any opinion and a large group of people, some people are going to disagree, so it's always flaimbait.
Hello, take a hint from the number of posts which say, effectively, "-1 (Flaimbait)" as a response to the story posted.
The slashdot editors troll all the time. Why are you surprised that trolling is the predominant type of post?
Basically, if you actually want good discussion, Jamie, you should spread around the message that editors should try to give a good start to the discussions. In many cases, that would be staying silent. Maybe institute a rule of thumb: if your editorial wouldn't get above a +3, don't post it.
You're the one who said that you want good discussion on
This is, of course, only if you actually want to promote discussion on slashdot. If you don't, it's your site and you can read through all of the bad "arguments" and whining and near-constant trolling to your hearts content. I hope that you enjoy whichever choice you make.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
If I remember correctly I spotted a post several weeks ago entitled something like "XP Pipe speed Slower than Win2k?" Instead of pointing to examples using direct MS Software titles, it pointed to actual tests of piping, and even gave you the code used for the benchmark. And last I checked, much of multitasking often relies on piping, especially in a software package that trades information between binaries, as would Office XP.
:)
But ofcourse you cant expect MS to write any type of data exchange that is fast, I mean after all, they wrote DDE
-If your not the lead dog, the view never changes-
I am curious as to which service pack the windows 2000 machine was using. If it was sp2 (as i would think it is), then we must also take into consideration that Windows 2000 has had a lot of time for refinments through these service packs, let M$ release a few "critial updates", patch a few things up, release a SP or two, then compare.
XP just came out, but it is still going to be developed, it very well may improve over time through updates.
This is a duh story. It's more of a processor and ram hog because of all the new services, as well as the different kernel and the upgraded version of explorer.exe as the shell. Being that as it may, you can change it to look just like windows 2000, and it runs just as smooth. But out of the box, or new users alike, it's a hog.
.NET servers come with the performance as standard, ALTHOUGH, it does come with the gui for the nice blue taskbar, etc. On a server? Nuts. .NET also comes with share point portal server, a sort of internal web server for corporate networks. Not sure on what else it does.
802.11 support is turned on automatically, as well as the remote processes. RPC cannot be turned off, only blocked, so this would be another thing.
The shell is one of the major hogs. If you change a registry entry, the exact is at regedit.com it splits the backround from the taskbar, and increases perfomance, as well as when you turn off all the appearance features and go for the performance.
Luckily the
Back to XP. With windows there is a program that works like fvwm in linux, it's called litestep and gives you 3 to up to umpteen virtual desktops. I've seen 64 used, although I don't see why after 4 or 9. The windows XP power tools, located on the microsoft website, give you something called msvdm, and it has 4 virtual desktops, with which you can put a different backround on each virtual desktop. Power tools also has a graphics calculator, and some other neat things. Power tools is made, but not supported by, Microsoft developers.
But with that said, XP is more stable than windows 2000, a little better driver support, not much though. It only makes sense though that an upgrade from Microsoft would take up more resources. The new pentium 4 2 gighz is out, and the 64 bit intel comes out next year sometime.....
As far as Win2k goes, I still don't understand exactly what the hell is going on when I delete certain files... and they magically fade back to life unharmed. One neat effect of this is that you can "vanish" huge files instantly in a pretty crazy way.
Try this sometime instead of "recylcing" a large file: rename it "Notepad.exe" and drop it into your windows directory, replacing the regular notepad.exe. Wait a few seconds, or cd up and cd back into the windows directory. As if by magic, your huge renamed file has been transformed back into a magically restored pristine and original copy of notepad.exe Hurray! Where did all the bytes go? Who knows?! Why does the OS do this to protect a crappy default text editor that I desperately want to replace with something like editpad? I have no idea! But it IS sort of insane, which is nice.
I just installed XP on a freshly formatted and defragged drive... It seems just a bit slower then the same computer with Win2k on it.
...slower...
:/
The skinning idea is OK, but the default choice and selection of skins sucks. Also, even with the old windows skin on, over all, it seems that the ui is
Nothing really seems to be running faster, but not everything got slower.
I'll probably be reinstalling 2k by the end of next week when I get around to it
Can anyone explain to me why PEOPLE ALWAYS WHINGE AND WHINGE ABOUT NOT GETTING THEIR STORIES POSTED?
Sorry mate, we just DON'T CARE that you submitted it first.
Next thing, you'll be posting stories about Natalie Portman and hot grits...
I've hardly ever come across Windows Zealots. People use Windows because they need to get things done. Linux, now that's an OS with Zealots...
LOL! Funniest Post I read all day!
I wish I was a moderator today so I can Mod your post way up.
What you said is true too. Although, I would love Linux or OSX to rule the desktop, software development will continue to follow the dollar, and that is in Windows based apps.
As my old man told me when I was young, it's hard to beat an honest man. Beating a liar is easy.
Sooner or later, something dramatic will happen as a result of MS's practices, and it will reflect sufficiently badly on them that people will start seriously looking for alternatives. In the tech sector, this is already happening to an extent; the whole XP/.NET/Passport thing is putting off a lot of the people I know who are responsible for the IT infrastructure in their companies, and now upgrades aren't happening and key servers are being moved to alternative platforms.
The problem is, if all you do if provide FUD in return, then the honest and trusting consumer has nowhere to turn when they lose their faith. They've been screwed by MS (or, more likely, someone exploiting an MS security hole) and they want out, but then all they hear is that other people have been screwed when they bought RedHat thinking the installation was going to be as easy as Windows.
Ultimately, the best way to beat a charlatan is still to be an honest man.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Y'know, back in about 1990, the 8086 with 640K of RAM running MS-DOS in my mother's office could go from power-on to typing in Word within about 10 seconds. Kinda puts it all in perspective, doesn't it? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I had a 95 box with a scsi zip that needed to be detected and dhcp that from power on to usable system is 21 seconds. I don't mind long boot times, just don't make me reboot!. Ah, but 9x also has one thing I liked; You could hold down the shift key while "rebooting" and it only exits to dos and starts windows again, saving a lot of time.
Also, when 98 came out, I tested 95 vs 98, 95 was about 10% faster on same hardware with no tweaks other than turning off active desktop and the like in 98.
That system was:
k6 233
64 Ram
Diamond Viper 330 (Riva 128)
Asus tx97 mobo
Now keep in mind the p2 came out about the same time. So that system was a good system. Test included Q2, netscape, boot times, and other games.
Also, one thing i find funny, when 98 came out, I warned people about potential viruses because of the intergration of non controlled media on your computer, and well look now. We have just ben (un)lucky that none of the viruses actualy did any "real" dammage besides bandwith.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
(2) Let's see. Newer, beefier OS. Same hardware. Who do you think is going to be slower? The way I see it, prices of the hardware are *always* dropping, and the hardware available for the WinXP launch allows XP to run much faster than Win2000 did at launch.
64bit versus 32bit? Yeah, I'd like to see an unbiased report on this, please. Thanks to all the slashdot readers who submitted links to other reviews and comparisons.
Honestly now:
Who gives a shit about the new rubbish being slower than the old one? DOS was faster than 3.11, Win95 slower than DOS (and about 2000% larger!).
Mickeysoft allways bloats it's OSes and calls it technological improvement. Often enough Intel, AMD and Co. kiss their feet for that 'cause that's how they can sell new processors 'n stuff.
How much have I learned to thank Linus Torwalds for fighting tooth and nail for tried & true real technological improvements and not just the bananabloatware those ancient inhouse OSes and graphical enviroments constantly incorporate.
It's one big moneymaking ratrace. Take it or leave it, but picking at it time over time is just plain silly and starting to get boring.
I gather the 2.4 Kernel runs rock solid and smooth on my 486/DX4/100 with 16MB to make for the best rooter I could ever wish for. Examples for two completely different aproaches in Software technology.
Guess which one's got the edge.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
yeah, all the extra GUI eye-candy makes it a little slower at first, but once you configure it to the way you like it(and you cant tell me you dont make any changes to a default Gnome/KDE/insert ANY Linux WM/GUI here) it is MUCH faster than Win2k. my problem with it is Media Player 8 and IE6....THIS is what slows down XP so much!
also, how memory were they using? 64-128???
the history of the world
I hate it whenever a new OS comes out. Cause then I know all the software will run on only that, and nothing else. Programmers used to (some still do), design their programs to be extremely efficient and run from 368's to Pentium Pro's. On slower machines, they were cut off some of the bells and whistles, and on the faster ones they had better features but they still did more or less the same things. I waste hours of time trying to get a Photoshop effect in Paint Shop Pro, cause that's all that will run on my box. WinXP takes up a tremendous amount of space too. Estimate about 1.5 gigs for the OS, that leaves me 600mb of space on my 2.1gb hd. I am a fan of Linux, and it does run faster that Win98, but it still bloats down. Most people here do not realize that Linux is nearly as slow as Win on a bad machine. I used Red Hat 6 for a while to see the difference, and gave up the 5% performance for a bit more software compatability. I'm an amateur developer, and I give useful software that I created (notably Euclid2K, a math program) to my friends at school. There are a total of 5 people at my school who ever even heard of Linux, so I am actually chained to Windows because of that. I try to optimize my code as much as I can. Ditch the Visual x stuff, DOS is fine for my purposes and the purposes of most programmers: Input and Output. I recently took a C course given by an old M$-hater geezer from NZ called Mr Dewsnip, and all he taught the class was how to make rectangles and draw cars on iMacs with CodeWarrior. Nothing else. Not even "Hello World!". Just an endless stream of PaintRects. I never wanted to draw a car on the screen. Why would I need to? Thats not the point of programming. Its all I/0 in my opinion. Microsoft needs better coders. Could you imagine how good WinXP would be if the team consisted of Linus Torvalds and other gurus? It would be amazing. Life is sure not easy with a Pentium MMX 200MHz processor, 32 megs of RAM and a 8MB Cirrus Logic PCI graphics card. Thats why I love linear programming instead of Visual.
OLE? What the heck is that? A Microsoft invention?
--- "pero toda poesía es hostil al capitalismo"
I mean switching from Linux to any MS crapware is a DOWNgrade.
--- "pero toda poesía es hostil al capitalismo"
Simple really.
We like
But at the same time, can't you see that there probably isn't such a thing as a 'single queue'. There are several people who post the stories to slashdot. Your story was probably judged as not worth it by one slashdot bod, whereas this other guy's story got through to Mr. Malda and he felt it worth posting. Another factor might be the quality of the writeup.
Please just accept that it's THE LUCK OF THE DRAW. Slashdot gets loads of submissions per day. Really, just because you found a link on the web doesn't make you important. And whingeing like a child every time someone else's submission gets used instead of yours just smacks of sour grapes.
First thing that often needs to be done is to point out the problems, and I will probably continue to do this, so get used to it. It is obvious that there are some problems with various things here at