InfoWorld says WinXP much slower than Win2K

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

Comments

Same anecdotal evidence here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[Anonymous Coward]

And according to the article, it seems that the UI itself is killing the system. Splitting out the UI work to a separate processor via SMP results in massive improvement in performance. Sadly, I have no dual-proc machines here...

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[beable]

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

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[sjgman9]

I have XP Pro and 2K Pro on my computer. p3 450, 384 megs of PC 133 ram, XP on my 8 gig fujitisu ata 66 5400 (i think) rpm hd, and 2000 on my 20 gig ata 100 hd. Graphics card is a NVidia GeForce2MX. Mobo is an intel sx440bx.

Bottom line: With all the fancy graphics and blending and other UI "enhancements", Windows XP is slower than 2000. When i take all the UI enhancements off XP and get it similar to 2000, XP is at least as fast, if not faster thatn 2000. Come on, Microsoft has had from feb 2000 to August 2001 to speed up the code!

I like the addidional drivers, things just work. I dont like the rampant ads for .net and windows media player. Netscape 6.2 is blazing fast!
Activation: It sucks. find a way to negate it.

I needed a new driver for my creative soundblaster soundcard. out now. Most things will have good drivers. I just wish Windows XP could be slimmed down to get rid of the fluff.

Overall, great os.

Re:Same anecdotal evidence here

[loraksus]

I'm not going to argue about whether the o/s is good or not - but you mention that MS had time to speed up their code.

Think about this for a sec:
What incentive does a software manufacturer have to make their code run faster? Especially a large o/s manufacturer like MS.

People are going to buy your o/s anyways, if they don't have a fast enough computer, they will upgrade for the software, possibly even buying a new box.

Corporate upgrades of software, at least in my experience, always come with upgrades of hardware.

not the only performance hit

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:not the only performance hit

[Heywood Yabuzof]

Huh? You can make XP look (and "work") a lot like 2K if you want to. I'm not using XP every day but on the TechNet versions we got to test, that's the first thing I did to customize it. I wouldn't really call it a "huge amount of retraining".

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

Re:not the only performance hit

[Shimmer]

The differences in the new XP GUI and the old Me/2K GUI are very superficial and easy to learn. You can even set XP to use the old GUI with a single click.

-- Brian

Re:not the only performance hit

[ConceptJunkie]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:not the only performance hit

[BrookHarty]

Cleartype is not just for laptops, its awesome on crt monitors also. Cleartype make normal anti-aliasing look like crap.

BTW, you can customize the cleartype look on the cleartype m$ page.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/defa ult.htm

Re:not the only performance hit

[tmark]

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.

I gotta love how Linux zealots downplay the difficulty in switching users to Linux but then jump on top of Microsoft when they change their UI - as if that made the abhorrent UIs currently available on Linux somehow even approximately as useable as (the still crappy) Windows UI.

Re:not the only performance hit

[Masem]

If only we told people how to *use* computers as opposed to teaching them to click on specific buttons and using specific menu items to do specific tasks...

Typically, as long as an OS has a consistent interface *and* plenty of help, I doubt a well-trained computer user will get lost. However, sheep that are trained on how to use Windows or Word or Excel will flounder when they have to deviate a bit from the path.

The XP interface isn't terrible. (I'm a sucker for AA fonts and alpha layer fun). All the buttons are in the usual places, but look just a bit different. But because we've "trained" people to look for a black X on a grey button in the top right corner of a blue-background window border in order to close a window, the new XP interface will give those sheep headaches. Microsoft's fault? No; I blame "..For Dummies" and the rest for the sheep mentality.

Re:not the only performance hit

[wass]

You can even set XP to use the old GUI with a single click.

Kind of off-topic, but therein lies the rub on simplicity. An OS is an easy OS when you know it. Settings are easy to change when you know where to go poking around to change them.

When you know which series of menus to go through to change the XP look n' feel (is it really only a single click? I haven't used XP, or any windows for nearly 2 years now), that's easy. So too is it easy for someone to modprobe the latest tulip driver NIC driver in linux. Of course, not knowing how to do these things makes it more difficult for the newcomer. (yeah yeah I know, here on /. we're all geeks and finding the right setting for plain-old win9x look is probably fairly obvious, but is that true for everybody?)

Sorry, i know it's off-topic, your post just piqued me in a certain way.

Re:not the only performance hit

[kevinank]

Ridiculous tricks like that wouldn't be required if programmers were encouraged to write applications which were independent of screen resolution.

Last week I was up in Oregon helping a friend who just turned 80 to configure his Windows desktop, and he had it configured for 640x400 on a 17" monitor. I tried upping the resolution to 1024x800 but he couldn't read the text any longer. And from my own experience with Windows, I know that bumping up all font sizes in prefs just makes the Windows application dialogues illegible.

So after showing him my online photo album, I set the resolution back to 640x400.

Re:not the only performance hit

[scotch]

You can even set XP to use the old GUI with a single click.

Does Amazon know about this? Someone call Bezos!

Re:not the only performance hit

[rhavyn]

Well, the answers for KDE are
1) The first part yes, I don't know how KDE configures the menu

2) Yes

3) Yes (well besides the fact that you aren't going to get it to work on Windows anything ... but if you tar it, burn it and extract it on another KDE machine)

Again, people who don't know what they are talking about should learn to not talk

Re:not the only performance hit

[geomcbay]

For the record, I've been a computer programmer since the C64 days. But I really dislike this "people who don't know how to use *real* computers are sheep" attitude.

Computers are no different than anything else: Cars, VCRs, whatever. Yet hardcore tech guys tend to think people are stupid for not learning how to "use" computers, often snickering at those who have never used a CLI. The simple fact of the matter is many people don't WANT to learn the in-depth operation of a computer just like most don't want to learn the exact details of how a car, tv, vcr or whatever works. They just want an extremely simple, fairly standard UI. They have lives to lead that include many things other than computer use and aren't willing to spend 1000s of hours learning the ins and outs of computer use just to type letters and surf the web -- and they shouldn't have to.

Re:not the only performance hit

[Ereth]

And yet...

These same people who can't figure out the interface changes in Windows or Linux or Mac, who you regard as being ok for that problem, have absolutely zero problem when they buy a new TV or VCR or DVD Player and have to learn a new remote. It's a new interface, they simply learn it, without even bitching much. Some go out and buy universal remotes and Prontos so they can keep their old interface, but most just learn the new interface ("Oh, play is over here now"). There's no "extremely simple, fairly standard UI" on consumer electronics. Even on-screen displays differ from manufacturer to manufacturer.

The reason they can't do that on their computer is that it's somehow "ok" to not understand a computer, so most of them don't bother to try. They are afraid of the machine and so learn exactly how to do the one or two things they need to know, and as soon as you move the button it confuses them, because they were always intimidated in the first place. You make them comfortable with the computer, they'll be less bothered by where the little "x" moved to.

Re:not the only performance hit

[Nurf]

I don't think that was what he was saying. He said nothing about users not being able to use "real" computers. He just said they should be trained in a manner that teaches them techniques rather than pure rote learning. I think you are fitting his post to an internal mold.

I have a friend who taught a beginner's course on computers. The first thing he did was get them to break old CPUs with a hammer, and then told them "That's about the only way you'll break a computer". He got them all to disassemble floppy disks. He taught them the difference between their data and the computer. He taught them not to be afraid to experiment, once they had made sure their data was safe.

He taught them how word processors and spreadsheets generally behaved, not a long list of rote muscle movements. The end result was a group of people that were very relaxed with using a computer and found new programs and interfaces non-threatening.

I have met other people who have been to courses that are floored if a menu option gets moved from one menu to another. BZZT Segmentation fault (core dumped). *wail* *panic*

There should be no "ins and outs" to using a computer, I agree. And often there aren't if you are just willing to poke around for a few minutes in a relaxed manner. Of course, this would be easier if UIs were even vaguely consistent.

I object to people using computers like trained animals. Sheep are for eating and wool. However, I don't blame them. I blame the idiots who teach people to be sheep (and the fools that condone it).

Your post has some good points, but they address something the original poster never said, IMO.

Re:not the only performance hit

[ConceptJunkie]

My only experience is on a laptop which usually doesn't have any peripherals stuck to it, so once I see the desktop, I'm good to go. In any event, even if what you say is true for a more loaded machine, it's still better than sitting there watching it "Applying Security Changes..." or whatever it says for 2 minutes with Win2k, while the OS steps out back for a smoke.

XP may only be NT 5.1, but for what I use it (and Win2k) for, it does the job.

Re:not the only performance hit

[ryanwright]

The simple fact of the matter is many people don't WANT to learn the in-depth operation of a computer just like most don't want to learn the exact details of how a car, tv, vcr or whatever works.

Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

For the record, I don't consider people like this very smart. If you have no desire to learn the details of how something works, you shouldn't be using it. I know a guy who had no desire to learn how his car works. When the oil light came on, he didn't care, because he didn't know what it meant. When the engine siezed a couple of days later and it cost him $3000 to replace, he finally decided it might be a good idea to learn a little about his vehicle.

Maybe that's the difference between intelligent people and the common sheep. Intelligent people actually make an attempt to understand the products they use. The common sheep only learn the bare minimum to get by and nothing more.

Re:not the only performance hit

[issachar]

that's not even remotely (no pun intended) on the same scale.

a remote control is a very simple system, and doesn't even come close to the complexity of Windows, Linux or any other major OS. More to the point, the UI on a remote doesn't change that much. The play button always looks the same, the rewind is always to the left of the play button and the fast forward is always to the right. stuff like that.

We need to be developing systems for the consumer that are about as idiot-proof as a your toaster or CD-player.

I don't know how my car is built, and I don't care. And I don't think that information should be necessary to drive my car. Same deal with computers.

Re:not the only performance hit

[jlbennett2]

What's a CLI?

Network Engineer since 1998!

Re:not the only performance hit

[kaladorn]

For the record, I don't consider people like this very smart. If you have no desire to learn the details of how something works, you shouldn't be using it. I know a guy who had no desire to learn how his car works

I will observe that there is a difference between having the interest in something and having the time to investigate it. For example, there was a time when a car was a fairly rudimentary thing to do most operations on. This was well before a dozen sensors controlled combustion, before vehicle engine control modules with arcane diagnostic codes that require a mechanic or a nasty piece of hardware to get at. This was before the level of complexity of those systems grew to the level it currently is.

I also don't know... you may have tremendous amounts of spare time. Most people don't. I'd love to know why my Doctor prescribes a certain medication, but at some level, I have to take his word for it as anything more than a beer n' pretzels explanation will exceed my university chemistry knowledge level. Similarly, I ask my mechanic why he's doing something, but once he moves off into bafflegab, I'm left with two choices: trust that he's a professional or don't.

I think I could probably walk around almost anyone's house or the environment they work in and identify at least some things about which they know little or nothing other than how to operate the item in question in a simple way. We humans now live in a complex world and not only is it infeasible for you to know something about everything you come in contact with, it is inefficient. Specialization is efficient. Knowing a little bit about a lot of things has some utility, but that isn't having real knowledge of those things. A veneer isn't in-depth knowledge. And if you spend your life trying to investigate all of the existing objects that you come in contact with, you won't be doing much else.

Reduction of complexity to usable levels is how humans cope with an increasingly complex world. Reducing formerly complex tasks which had to be understood in detail to black box technologies that anyone can get at least average utility out of is how we move on to dealing with higher level concerns. I for one am glad that I don't have to worry about what IRQ or DMA channel or I/O space address my various PC cards occupy now. There was a time when I did. I wasted hours friggin' around with these things because it was a necessity. It no longer is, and I can worry about new (and more worthwhile) concerns.

And, strictly as an aside, the snide down-the-nose look that most Geeks tend to give the untermensch that compose most of our world and who use M$ products doesn't exactly enhance the reputation of our caste nor encourage people to seek our help our to try our chosen solutions. In fact, it drives them deeper into the hands of those who offer them no pain and who pander to how the world is, not how we all wish it were.

Re:not the only performance hit

[vsync64]

I've said this before and I'll say it again. I don't in any way expect people to know every detail of how every component in their system works. I do, however, expect them to understand the basics before wreaking havoc upon the lives of others in the community they invade. I also expect them not to run away in disgust when knowledge is presented to them on a silver platter.

I don't know how everything in a car works, but I understand the basics of axles and gears. I don't know every line of telephone switch code by heart, but I understand the basics of country codes, area codes, and prefixes. And so on. For a computer, the equivalent is understanding the basic differences between short-term and long-term storage, how file systems are organized ("This is a folder/directory. You can put files or other folders in it."), and the like. For networks, the basics are host addressing schemes (TLDs, user@host, etc), simple protocol knowledge (no, your mail is not sent over the Web, even though there may be a Web front end, and there is more to the Internet than the WWW), and what "client", "server", "upload", and "download" mean. I have no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who refuses to learn these basics, any more than I would expect sympathy from a police officer if I attempted to drive without first learning what the pretty colors on traffic lights meant.

The second and more important issue I mentioned is that people tend to shun the acquisition of knowledge, especially when computers are involved. No, I don't know everything about how a VCR works. But I had a VHS tape I needed to watch the other day get crumpled, and what did I do? I broke out the screwdriver. And now I know exactly how the VCR releases the locks on the tape spools, how the tape feeds through the cartridge, and all the other knowledge that will let me more quickly diagnose a problem with my VCR if it ever occurs again, and I watched my video on time.

I don't expect every computer user to open the case every time something goes wrong, but I expect it to make at least a token effort at proper use and maintainence of the system it uses on a daily basis. If I say "your file system keeps getting corrupted because you keep turning off your computer when it is writing to disk", I expect you to stop cutting power in that fashion. If I say "the reason it keeps having to write to disk so much is that you need more than 32MB of RAM to run 5 applications at the same time", I expect you to get more RAM or stop whining to me, and certainly not to say "but it has a gigabyte" when I have explained the difference between short-term and long-term memory 5 times in the past 3 minutes.

If someone wants to be lazy and ignorant, that's his problem. But he shouldn't expect his life to be a seamless ocean of perfect technological ecstacy, and he shouldn't expect me to gladly mop up after him for free. I reserve the right to charge high prices for the accumulated technical knowledge of a lifetime, when he could have learned what he needs to know in 5 minutes of his own time.

Re:not the only performance hit

[sfe_software]

Actually ClearType depends on "subpixels" found in LCD displays.

See this page for a decent explanation of how it works...

Re:not the only performance hit

[Jonathan]

Computers are no different than anything else: Cars, VCRs, whatever...The simple fact of the matter is many people don't WANT to learn the in-depth operation of a computer just like most don't want to learn the exact details of how a car, tv, vcr or whatever works.

And yet to learn to drive a car, which is a far simpler device in theory than a computer, it is considered perfectly normal to have to take a course lasting several months. Nobody claims that cars have to be "intuitive". Additionally, in one of the last holdovers of sexism, males at least are expected to know enough about the inner workings of cars to know how to change oil, flat tires, and to recognize weird noises that indicate mechanical problems.

Re:not the only performance hit

[BrookHarty]

Cleartype is very distinctive on CRTS also. So it is Definately not just for LCDS

Re:not the only performance hit

[ryanwright]

Do you listen to music?

Do you know how to play an instrument?

Some of the replies missed my point entirely, including yours. I did not say, nor did I mean to imply, that one should learn everything related to anything they do. Using your example, if one listens to music, they should learn how to properly operate the equipment they listen to the music on. They don't need to know exactly how the insides of the receiver work or how the music is made, but if the left speaker quits working, they should be able to adjust the balance and check the connections.

To answer your question: Yes, I know how to play instruments. I can read and write sheet music, I've played the violin since the 5th grade, and recently (~2 years) taught myself how to play the piano.

Re:not the only performance hit

[ryanwright]

You also undoubedly understand the details of manufacturing your carpet, your clothes, ...

Nowhere did I say one should understand the details of manufacturing. I said, and I quote, "If you have no desire to learn the details of how something works, you shouldn't be using it." I'll say it again: The details of how something works. Not the details of how something is made. There is a huge difference.

And if you fly or use the train I'm sure you could give us a riveting lecture on the details of a locomotive or jet engine, as well as how quickly you could diagnose a problem, replace a broken part, or take the captain's chair in the cockpit should the pilot fall ill.

As a passenger, I am not "using" (or operating) the vehicle, the engineer or pilot is. Thus, the responsibility to know the details of the vehicle lies on them (although there is a certain responsibility on the part of the passenger to know at least a little about the vehicle, lest they do something stupid and endanger themselves). If you were looking over my shoulder while I operated a computer, I would not expect you to know what I'm doing. However, if you yourself were operating the computer, then yes, you should know what you are doing. Neglecting to learn is pure ignorance at best, complete stupidity at worst. Would you allow your teenager to hop in a car for the first time and learn to drive as he goes? Of course not. You'd send him to a class to learn a thing or two beforehand.

As a side note, I am more than capable of taking the captain's chair in the cockpit of a commercial airliner should the pilot fall ill. I've never been on a train and don't know a thing about operating one, though I'm pretty sure I could figure out how to stop one if I had to.

- electrical lines and switchboxes, phone hookups, plumbing, heating elements and sewage.
- your computer (a given), as well as your speakers, stereo system, cable box, television, toaster, coffee pot, microwave oven, digital clock radio, refrigerator, hot water heater, vacuum cleaner, etc. etc. If you don't, you shouldn't be using any of these devices.

Let's be quite clear here: In no way did I suggest anyone be able to build a vaccumn cleaner from scratch, repair a refrigerator, or wire up a home for electrical service. Rather, I said people need to understand how the devices work.

Knowing how an item works allows you to use it correctly. If you don't understand the basic concepts of electricity, you'll do what my neighbor did last night: Sucked the cord up into her vaccumn cleaner, tore the insulation off of it, pulled it back out while the unit was still running, then continued vaccumning with bare copper wire hanging out. Had she understood how vaccumn cleaners work, she never would have put her hand up into the spinning brush, and had she understood how electricity works, she would have unplugged it immediately. Her insistance on using these items (vaccumn cleaner and AC power) without learning their details could have cost her a couple of fingers, or worse.

How about another side note? : I've wired many circuits in my home, including my attic lighting & garage outlets. I wired my entire home with cat5 cabling for phone & computer networking. I didn't take care of the plumbing, but could have with no problems had I the desire to do so. Heating elements are basically giant resistors. I've repaired many of my electronics and home appliances and know how every one of them works. So, yes, I do know the intimate details of how everything in my home works. As a matter of fact, I helped in the construction and could have built the entire home myself had I the desire to do so.

We passed the days when one could master the art of understanding/producing all of the appliances used in daily life about 10,000 years ago, right after the end of the Stone Age. I think just about everyone understands this, except young arrogant fools who fail to think through their absurd notions before posting them to a public forum.

Millions of people understand all of the appliances used in daily life (not how to produce them, but a general overview of how they work, and how to use them). If you do not know these things, then I take pity on you. Your ignorance and failure to learn how to use the devices around you will one day get you into trouble if it hasn't already.

Re:not the only performance hit

[ryanwright]

I ask my mechanic why he's doing something, but once he moves off into bafflegab, I'm left with two choices: trust that he's a professional or don't.

Yes, but you still understand the basic concepts of your vehicle: You know it needs fuel to run. You know what the oil does and why it's important. Likewise with coolant. If you don't, you should.

I did not mean to imply that someone should be able to create or repair all of the devices they use. Merely that they understand how the device works. I don't expect everyone to be able to diagnose and repair their own vehicle. However, if the temperature light were to come on, I would expect the driver to understand the cooling system enough that he pulls over, lets it cool off, then checks for adequate fluid. A willingness to learn these things is what separates you from the common sheep.

I think I could probably walk around almost anyone's house or the environment they work in and identify at least some things about which they know little or nothing other than how to operate the item in question in a simple way.

I agree, and this is exactly the point I'm making: People need to do a little research into the items they use. I don't think it is at all infeasible for people to learn how to operate items used on a daily basis in more than a simple way. Assuming a person had never used a telephone before, it would take less than a minute to learn. Why not spare the extra 5 minutes and learn how to use it's advanced features - speakerphone, voicemail, transfer, conferencing, hold, mute, etc? Any reasonably intelligent person can handle this.

The same thing goes for items around your house: You may understand how to change the channels on your VCR, but you should also learn how to set the clock and program timers. To merely plug it in and leave it blinking "12:00" shows your ignorance (I don't know how) or apathy (I don't care how). In the first case, it also shows a hint of stupidity (I'm not smart enough to learn how).

Re:not the only performance hit

[ryanwright]

Essentially, what it boils down to is my final line: you're an arrogant young fool who thinks that his own personal notions of 'how things should be' must be applied to every other human being on the planet. The notion is nothing but pure ego forwarded by a technical elitist who can't imagine just how silly he looks making these sorts of claims.

I'd imagine no more silly than you look, being unable to compose an intelligent reply without resorting to ridicule and name calling...

Tell me again...

[Shotgun]

how this is ANY different from every previous release of Windows?

Hell, even Linux distributions are starting to follow this trend.

Re:Tell me again...

[Junks Jerzey]

Hell, even Linux distributions are starting to follow this trend.

Starting? That's how its been for years. I don't mean that in a trolling way either.

Silly people

[gergi]

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...

Re:Silly people

[sharkey]

Doesn't it have a 3D animated dog to help with the search applet? Or was this just a rumor?

Not much of a surprise

[Shimmer]

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

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

-- Brian

Re:Not much of a surprise

[joshjs]

This is why I still have my typewriter: you don't even have to tell it to print, it's so damn fast.

Re:Not much of a surprise

[griffjon]

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Re:Not much of a surprise

[malfunct]

I guess you can say win95 is faster but when you count all the extra work you have to do to reboot it, and reinstall it, and all the features you are missing (yes I happen to like WMP and the built in cd burning and the built in scanning features of XP) you probably end up way behind when you use win95.

Heck including the browser with the OS was such an incredible leap in usefulness of the OS that it threatened to shake the very foundations of the computer software world.

That said there are things that DON'T need to be changed and I'm not sure that office XP works any better for me than office 2000 or office 97. I'm not sure it works anyworse either though.

BTW if software companies didn't abuse the hell out of moore's law and the gullibility of people to upgrade when they say to, many many programmers would be without jobs in the computer industry and that just sux.

Do what you want to one way or another, but I'm going to stick with winXP at this point with its ability to keep my computer going for 60 days (and counting) without reboots and still let me use all my windows tool and windows games and let me burn a cd as easily as copying files from one hd to another.

Re:Not much of a surprise

[jazman_777]

BTW if software companies didn't abuse the hell out of moore's law and the gullibility of people to upgrade when they say to, many many programmers would be without jobs in the computer industry and that just sux.

You're suggesting that a known inefficiency is good for the economy? So, we spend x dollars for something that really is not needed. How is that good? These people could be better employed doing something useful, instead of "propping up a bogus sector of the economy."

Re:Not much of a surprise

[Paul Komarek]

"Heck including the browser with the OS was such an incredible leap in usefulness of the OS that it threatened to shake the very foundations of the computer software world."
That's one of the funniest things I've read on slashdot. How is including the browser with the OS an incredible leap in usefulness? Even MS execs testified under oath that this gained nothing for the users. Why is an OS with a "built-in" browser more useful than an OS on which you can install a browser with the same features?

I can only think of one way in which this bundling might "shake the very foundations of the computer software world": everyone laughing so hard when MS tried to keep a straight face about how this benefited their customers.

To shake the foundations of the computer software world, you make something like Emacs before there are graphical windowing systems; you develop fast polynomial linear program solvers; you try a new approach at OS design like UNIX or microkernels.

Unnecessarily selling the browser with the OS doesn't make anything shake except heads.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Not much of a surprise

[be-fan]

More features does not necessarily mean slower. Win2K had tons more features than NT4, but it was faster for most desktop-type uses. When you turn of Luna, XP is slightly faster (significantly faster in terms of app loading) than Win2K. (According to MaximumPC, whom I trust a hell of a lot more than InfoWorld, or any mainstream magazine for that matter.)

Re:Not much of a surprise

[Ayende Rahien]

Yes, indeed.
That is a remant from Word 1.0 or so, I believe.

even more shocking...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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...

Re:even more shocking...

[sulli]

But without the typos, it wouldn't be salshdto!

Re:even more shocking...

[sharkey]

Perhaps /. should require posters to have functional SHIFT keys on their keyboards before posting is allowed?

Re:even more shocking...

[iforgotmyfirstlogon]

In my defense, Taco edited the piss out of what I posted. It was error-free when I sent it in.

- Freed

Re:even more shocking...

[fobbman]

Well DUH! He had to keep it within normal /. standards.

I'm suprised by this

[johnburton]

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.

Re:I'm suprised by this

[Billly Gates]

I have only 200 megs of ram in my pIII 700 and it is alot faster then win2k rc1. The load time is incredible and it seems to be light and not that bloated. I was expecting the opposite. Not to mention my machine is 18 months old and not real up to date. Most business users will not even notice the slow down on things like Office. Today's machines are ridiculously overpowered anyway and most users will not see the downside at all. Even Q3a and UT run fast on XP.

Re:I'm suprised by this

[jilles]

Same for me. I had win2k on my machine earlier. I upgraded to XP and I must say it is slightly faster and just as stable. The UI is actually not that bad once you turn of the pretty colors (theres a silver color scheme which is pretty nice IMHO) I left all the graphical effects on because they really don't get in my way. I noticed that on a slower machine XP automatically turns off some options. And even on this slower machine performance was still adequate (for the record it was a PII233 with 64MB) although I prefer win 98 on it because that is a little lighter on the system resources.

Most stuff is actually in the same place it used to be. Some stuff was moved but there are no radical changes I'm aware of. The new start menu is actually quite nice once you remove the stuff you don't need from it. Easy access to frequently used apps is quite handy.

The new task oriented control panel is the most confusing to people used to the old control panel. But it is organized pretty well and most stuff can be found where you'd expect to find it. If it bothers you there's an option to reverse to the old style UI.

The .Net shit, pricing and legal issues aside I think it is safe to say that windows XP is MS' best product so far. If you intend to use it, make sure to put lots of memory in your machine. It will run with 64 MB (i tried it with office XP on the slow machine) but you will have a much smoother experience with 256MB or more (I have 512MB). Also make sure your hardware is supported since that seems to be the biggest issue with XP. I have a aureal vortex 2 soundcard and a voodoo 3 card. Both are supported by XP. However, the voodoo driver is worthless for gaming. Luckily there's an unsupported hacked together driver available on the internet. The soundcard works with the default driver but since the manufacturer no longer exists there will be no new drivers.

Re:I'm suprised by this

[WNight]

I don't think Windows moves the swap file while defraging. At least, Win2k with the default defrag program (which sucks btw) doesn't.

As soon as I install 2k I move the swap to another drive, reboot, defrag, move the swap back, make it fixed size, and reboot.

You want the swap on the first drive, if possible, because that's the fastest part of the hard drive. There's often a noticable speed difference between the first and last quarter.

Hard to argue with statistics

[Pov]

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.

Re:Hard to argue with statistics

[Reckless Visionary]

I was using XP (beta 2 mind you) on a Pentium 166 with 64 MB of RAM, well below the recommended specs, and was getting acceptable performance. I could use the maching as a web browsing, email, word processing machine without a problem. Of course I wouldn't be playing games on it or anything. Oh, and 6 months up-time BTW, no crashes.

Re:Hard to argue with statistics

[zulux]

I was using XP (beta 2 mind you)...
Oh, and 6 months up-time BTW, no crashes.

I thought all the RC's and Betas of XP had a 180 day limit.

This is a benchmark of only Office XP

[gburgyan]

How often in the last couple years did you notice "Gee, this word processor can't keep up with my mad typing skillz." So what if an automated benchmark can't make a bazillion documents as fast.

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.

Re:This is a benchmark of only Office XP

[geomcbay]

Something must be wrong with your computer if it takes 5 minutes for intellisense to pop up, and you notice any lag whatsoever when typing in Word. I've used both Visual C++ and Word plenty, including on not-so-hot low-end P2s and I've never seen anything like that.

Are you running the system off a floppy drive or what?

Re:This is a benchmark of only Office XP

[Guppy06]

"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."

How can you say that WinXP is noticably more reliable than Win2k with a straight face? The differences in reliability are invisible at best, and if they are noticable they are in Win2k's favor. This is to be expected when you consider that Win2k is proven code from NT and 9x while XP is a exerimental testbed of new ideas.

And I also take issue with the "much easier" to restore. The Backup Wizard in XP doesn't look much changed from 2000. As for registry repairs, I haven't actually looked into the features of either one (no need to, which is the way it should be), but if it's anything like the "improvements" in scanreg between 98 and ME (one's DOS-based, one's GUI), I wouldn't call them "great."

As for your comments about how the time lost is miliseconds, they just DOCUMENTED how much time is lost, and it's about 12%. We're not talking about miliseconds of lost time (unless you only typed for 0.0x seconds), we're talking about 7 seconds every minute. Three days a month.

XP is faster in certain circumstances

[pinny20]

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.

Microsoft announces Windows XP Turbo!

[Refried Beans]

Now with compiler optimizations!

The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[Uttles]

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.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[slow_flight]

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

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

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

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

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

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

And of course, here on Linux, we never make the same mistake. We're all just chugging along with fvwm as our window manager and pico as our editor and all of our apps have a footprint of less than 4 megs in total...

And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Bloat and feature creep happen on all platforms. It's just easier to escape under Linux, because you aren't locked into a single toolset. Calling it a Windows-only problem is a gross misnomer, however.

The real problem with sluggishness under Windows is actually device probing (during boot) and hard drive seek time (when launching anything, due to the many configuration files it checks). Swapping isn't a concern if you use your system wisely, and applications are usually quite responsive (YMMV). Branding Windows application programmers as lazy when your system bogs down is grossly oversimplifying.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[csbruce]

Gates Law: Every eighteen months, the speed of software halves.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[captaineo]

"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

Your statement is 100% correct but I strongly disagree with its implication... By wasting CPU cycles and disk space, programmers are achieving a higher level of complexity much more quickly and easily than before. e.g. by developing software in garbage-collected or dynamic languages like Java or Python, which dramatically reduce the difficulty of software development, at a moderate cost in efficiency.

Also consider e.g. a program that stores its data in flat or XML text files, versus packed binary files. The binary files are obviously going to waste less space, but you'll sure have a hard time editing them by hand.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[geekoid]

Actually the problem isn't "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" its the fact that people can become 'programmers' pretty easy now a days.
I have never meant a computer sientist, or software engineer that thought that way, but I have met a lot of programmers whpo have no clue about engineering and just write crappy bloated code.
If you had to get a engineering degree in to program, we would have a lot better code out there.
"I can draw a form, I as a progrmeer" mentality just pisses me off.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[nolife]

You seem to be making a correlation between cost effective technology and advances in technology.

The costs of technology products are determined by market demand and competition.

Look at the advancement path that almost every computer peripheral has taken over the years.

Remember when a 28.8k modem was more then 2x the price of a 14.4? Do you really think that 28.8k modem cost that much more to make? Same with CD drives, first the 2x then a 4x and now a 72x. Do you think it took some technology breakthrough to get a 20x over a 10x? No. It is all marketing. Milk the consumer for every dime you can get. Once the market gets saturated the price comes down to a stable level and the "older" items drop off the bottom to maintain the bare minimum price. Watch the CPU market. Same process.
There is proof in this concept with a few CDR's that are the same exact model internally but have different firmware. So you pay less for the 8x version then the SAME EXACT 12x writer.
Look at the laser printer options. The market bottom appears to be about $1000 for a good printer. Why does HP not sell the HP4 for like $300? Because they have the 4000 and 4050 for the same price the LJ4 was 6 years ago. Does it really cost $1200 to produce a printer? Where is the technology advancement in that thing? Would most people be happy with a LJ4? YES

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[dvdeug]

You mean computer scientists, who keep creating more and more abstract programming languages? The guys who invented call by name? Virtual machines? Languages with only infinite precision numbers? Languages with Church numbers (numbers represented through lists) only (Lisp 1.0)? Garbage collection? Bounds checking?

Computer scientists _are_ the classic "we have all this power, why don't we use it" people.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[spectecjr]

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.

You didn't read the article at all, did you? Infoworld compared the performance of VBA SCRIPTS between Win2k and WinXP.

Doesn't that strike anyone as a little contrived? Personally, I'd run Winstone - or something like that. But VBA? Jeesus.

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.

But that's just a theory. It'd certainly explain the slow-down though.

Simon

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[Uttles]

Did you happen to notice the amount of applications you installed when compared to Windows? I also installed Mandrake 8.1 and it was around a 2 GB install. I setup a dual boot so I also installed Win 98. After installing Win and all my applications I had used around 4 GB. Additionally, I have much fewer applications under Windows.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[Trepidity]

This is yet another reason to use Linux.

UNIX has been doing bloat since before Windows was even released - remember Motif?

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[Pengo]

It's very easy to say that and I can understand your perspective, but you have one huge cost I think is usually grossly underestimated. the R&D. It costs a lot of money to get a printer built and out the door, market it .. write drivers for it and support it, etc.

The manufacturing of a circuit board is cake if you know exactly what and how you want it built, but doing true case-studies on user reactions alone to a prototype could cost a small fortune.

Re:The age old programmers vs. engineers problem

[ksheff]

I run gnome on a P166 and it works just fine. In fact my computer newbie relatives preferred it to my sister's Windows laptop which was a couple years newer. It had 48M at the time they used it and bumping it up to 80M didn't speed it up that much. Maybe some server apps were configured to run and you haven't turned them off? It could also be related to the recent VM debate (IIRC 7.2 uses 2.4.7+patches), so upgrading to the most recent might also help.

I have mixed feelings

[tester13]

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.

Re:I have mixed feelings

[the_2nd_coming]

Assumedly this will be working out in coming bug fixes witch MS solicits from you every time an application crashes.

you know what, I had the exact same thought back in 95, and 98, and late 98....

Re:Windows XP upgrade sounds like a poor idea

[ijx]

I completely agree with all of the above points...

Win2k is the first version of Windows I've ever used that I can consider usable. Usable being a relative thing, of course.

Win2k will most certainly be the last version of Windows I'll ever buy... I'll simply pick up a newer Mac w/ OS X.

note: Win2k is also the only version of Windows I've ever purchased (separately). All the other ones were bundled w/ their respective computers. Then again, picking up Win2k Pro and Win2k Advanced Server w/ 5 CALs for $130 legally isn't so bad... ('So bad' again being relative.)

Oh please!

[mr.nobody]

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.

Re:Oh please!

[RocketScientist]

I think you're the one with the wheelbarrow full of excrement.

The NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 change was fairly dramatic. Nearly all of the control panel options disappeared, replaced with the ever-crappy, crashing pile of MMC. User Manager and Server Manager, gone. Complete retraining for all the sysadmins who have to use these tools daily and aren't sharp enough to pick it up on their own. Active Directory was introduced in Win2K, a large change for large organizations, where even incremental changes are extremely expensive.

The problem is that you don't remember how painful the Win2K upgrade was because it happened two years ago. When your company does the upgrade, go hang out with the user support folks for a couple days. Feel their pain. Take notes, and keep them. Otherwise you'll forget how much the XP upgrade sucks in a couple years, when, uh, Windows YP is introduced, or Windows XQ, or whatever they're going to call the next one, the one with build number 6.X.

rocketscientist.

Re:Oh please!

[ethereal]

If your servers are being managed by admins who can't figure out where the new controls for the server are, and can't RTFM on their own, then I truly pity you. But not too much, because you're probably the bastards that were propagating Code Red and Nimda :)

Re:Oh please!

[mpe]

If your servers are being managed by admins who can't figure out where the new controls for the server are, and can't RTFM on their own,


This is Windows we are talking about. Where manuals are optional extras and frequently short on useful content anyway.

Re:Oh please!

[Locutus]

The UI of OS/2 v1.x and v2.x have very little in common. The v1.x UI was more like Windows 3.x, a simple launcher. Now the OS/2 v2.x UI was/is based on CORBA and was/is an object-oriented UI. Windows 9x and whatever are getting closer to the OS/2 2.x,3.x, 4.x UI but are not there yet IMHO. When 256MB of RAM is standard they might be able to get COM to run like SOM did/does in 32MB.

IBM showed how the UI was/is supposed to be done but users knew the Windows Program Manager and the press flogged OS/2 at Microsofts request. Monopolies have THAT kind of power. Sure IBM could have done things differently but nothing would have prevented Microsoft from strong arming the OEM, and sales channels. And they still do it today.
LoB

Wow... ignorance is bliss huh guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 ... 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?"

Looks like he hit that nail right on the head, huh?

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

[elefantstn]

Would it really be news? "Windows XP works as it should..."

Yes.

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

[technos]

ignore the many other benchmarks that show WinXP performs as good if not better than 2k.

I have yet to see any other comprehensive benchmark. The only people saying it's faster are Microsoft, and they've yet to release hard numbers.

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

[Craig Maloney]

When was the last time you saw any of those magazines publish something that didn't trumpet the latest and greatest from Microsoft? Granted, that's probably a very harsh statement.

Also, Windows XP is supposed to perform better than Windows 9x. That's what NT has been for all along.

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

[geekoid]

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.

We have 100 machine running it here, and it sucks.
I'm going to a meeting this afternoon to determin if we will pull the plug based on are results.
If ew are only experinecing 11% degrade of preformance, I'll be surprised.

People say upgrade our hardware and the performance will Improve! I say either save money and get the same results from nnot changing or keep the same OS upgrade the harware and get even better results.

it runs better then 9x but we expect that.

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

[borzwazie]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[interiot]

ZDNet's review:

• If you've been using Windows 2000, the performance you'll get with XP is virtually identical; if you've been using Windows Me, 98 or 98 SE, or 95, your system is going to feel like it has a whole new lease on life.

EWeek's review

• We ... found that XP and 2000 outperformed Windows 98 and ran neck and neck with each other.

If you're comparing it to 2000, it meets expectations. If you're comparing it to 9x, it exceeds expectations.

So performance-wise, it's really nothing new. Get it because you like the application support, or the fast boot times, or the config restore, or... But don't buy it for the performance.

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

[zulux]

I think Microsoft has done a great job of making WindowsXP appear to be faster - My Win95 box on crapy hardware takes 90 seconds to boot, my XP box with great hardware takes fifteen seconds to see the log in screen - after that though the hard drive churns for another minuit. So to uninformed users - they think XP boots in fifteen seconds, not the real boot op time of a minuit or so.

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

[interiot]

AnAndTech's review also indicated that XP was slower than 2000...

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

[philibob]

FiringSquad posted their XP review and say that XP performs "on par, or better" than 2K.

They also posted full system specs, I am curious to see how much RAM the Infoworld machines had.

HOWEVER: Note that XP did lag behind in a couple benchmarks, including 100 points in 3DMark and a couple FPS in some games. (also: 98SE beat out both 2K and XP in 3DMark 2000)

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

[DarkEdgeX]

No kidding, the latest issue of Maximum PC has a review of Windows XP and gave it a 10/Kick-Ass rating. In their benchmarks, they show disk access speeds (as taken from Sandra on both 2K and XP), as well as app start-up speed (time it takes to start an app like Illustrator or Word). ESPECIALLY in the startup area, XP kicked ass. In 2000, Word would take (according to their benchmarks) around 6 seconds to be fully interactive. On XP, though, it took less than a second. According to the issue of MSDN I just got, which has an article on kernel enhancements (which some aren't really kernel enhancements, but they're all lumped together anyways), they state that load times were improved because of a multi-pronged effort in the system to optimize application startup. When applied to the boot process (another thing that Maximum PC showed a major improvement with under XP compared to 2000), the system goes so far as to have the defragmenter take all of the important startup files and put them into one contiguous space (thus allowing the boot loader to read the whole mess in at once).

I mean, I shouldn't be surprised that Taco and crew would be this biased, but c'mon! Atleast do some honest reporting, and not people-programming. We all have our reasons to hate MS, but XP certainly isn't one of them (atleast, not for the reasons stated in the article-- performance being the big one).

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

[King_TJ]

Hmm.... well, even if there is conflicting information out there - how can you slam Slashdot for just linking to a benchmark made by a very reputable publication?

Furthermore, I'd be much more inclined to believe Maximum PC if they benchmark tested load times of non-Microsoft apps. It's pretty easy for MS to make their own applications appear to start up faster than they really do by pre-loading shared code into memory during the OS bootup process.

(For example, note that Office '97 and 2K both default to placing an "Office Startup" shortcut in your startup program group. That makes sure a big chunk of MS Office is loaded into memory as soon as you log in, before you ever actually click to run any Office apps. That's an awfully nice way to gain an unfair advantage over competing products that don't try to suck down your system resources by pre-loading themselves before use.)

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

[haruharaharu]

The following organizations have tested XP, independently of Microsoft: CNET/ZDNET, eTesting Labs, eWeek, PC Magazine, and PC World. All these independent labs...

are owned by Ziff-Davis. No wonder they agree.

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

[sphealey]

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 ... nah ... InfoWorld was trying to make XP lose[...]

Infoworld was once an independent trade publication. When they saw the success that the ZD publications were having as a result of selling their souls to the highest bidding vendor, they started down that road as well. But it always seemed to me that perhaps they had just rented their souls, not sold them outright, and there was some hope of a recovery.

I don't have the data to say what the technical answer is on W2K vs. XP. However, just because the ZD empire shouts something in unison doesn't mean it is true.

sPh

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

[Billly Gates]

I think its fine.

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

[Keith Russell]

I had to go wading through the transcript of a live forum to find more detailed configuration info. For those of you wondering, each machine had 256 MB of RAM.

And check out the sidebar. Scenario 3 has 5 apps hitting a SQL Server database, 5 apps hitting an Exchange Server, and 5 Windows Media clips playing, while running a simulated user script jumping between Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and IE, all at the same time.

Has anyone here felt compelled to run 5 media files at the same time, while doing actual work?

This benchmark is far too artificial. At the very least, the multimedia workload test is bogus. A better multimedia benchmark would be to increase the horsepower requirements for a single app. Say, MP3 playback, to DVD playback w/ software decoding, to Quake III Arena with the settings maxed out. Not that anyone would be doing that while jumping between Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and IE, either....

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

[DarkEdgeX]

They did test other apps besides Office apps-- they tested Adobe Illustrator. And the point is moot-- these optimizations apply to ANY application which uses DLL's to share functionality; XP notes the order in which these DLL's are loaded, then makes a special pre-fetch file which helps the OS better load the app during the next startup.

Illustrator's start time improvement wasn't as pronounced as Word's start time improvement, but it was still a few seconds quicker, indicating that the optimizations do work for any vendor's app (even if that app wasn't specifically targetted for XP).

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

[Private Essayist]

"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. "

ROFL! Yeah, those are all real independent sites, sites that merely depend on Microsoft for their editorial and financial lives. Microsoft so dominates the stories they cover, and provides such good advertising revenue, it's in their best interests to not piss Microsoft off. And since you can tweak benchmarks in various ways, why not just take the results that echo the Microsoft party line, they can reason? It's a "real" result, isn't it? And if it keeps the Microsoft money and information access flowing, well we get to keep our jobs.

Yup, real independent...

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

[vsync64]

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

I don't make excuses. When coworkers start singing the praises of XP, I fire up Nautilus on my Slackware-running laptop and watch their jaws drop. Up the zoom level and it shows more information below each icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Hover the pointer over a music file and hear a preview? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Offer opaque file selection that doesn't skip and hop around grotesquely? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Use the first few lines of a text file as a thumbnail icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that."

It used to be that Linux was better as an overall system in terms of stability and fine-grained control, but suffered æsthetically and feature-wise when compared to Macs or even Windows. This has changed, I hope forever. I can honestly say that my "desktop experience" is vastly better in Linux than in Windows. Mozilla, with its tabbed browsing (and the middle mouse button, hooray); a decent window manager; and a file manager that doesn't offend me in every possible manner. And what am I intended to compare this with? IEXPLORE.EXE? rotfl.

(Nautilus, by the way, is the first GUI file manager, aside from the excellent TkDesk, to not disgust me within a minute, and the first to actually impress me on all fronts. I rarely load it, due to a desire to avoid RAM wastage, but it's quite nice, especially for browsing my photo collection. I might try ROX-Filer in the near future, just for variety.)

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

[DarkEdgeX]

I run Windows XP on a single-CPU Pentium III 800, and it performs as well as or better than 2000 on my system.

That's the only review I need.

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

[Kanasta]

The only thing is,
CNET=ZDNet=PC Mag=PC World=eWeek

Don't know who owns eTesting Labs, so in the end we only have 3 independent sources...

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

[DarkEdgeX]

How can you say it wouldn't be? It still would be, because personal experience (read: how well it runs in the REAL WORLD, not in IW's "benchmarks") would automatically tell me that "Gee, look, it performs as well as or better than Windows 2000 does for our users, and adds new features and functionality that we could really use".

So, what exactly was your point?

On a side note, for a write-up of some kernel (some not-so-kernel, really) that I mentioned in my original reply in this thread, check out MSDN Online. It's the same article that's printed in the magazine, complete with images where needed.. It sheds some light on the prefetching optimizations I mentioned.

Re:And MacOS X...

[BitwizeGHC]

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.

... but it does look like Candy Land. :)

Interface preferences are a matter of taste but I hope this "gooey GUI" fad passes soon.

This just in...

[Telek]

Running Word 6.0 on Windows 3.11 a Pentium 4 significantly outperforms Office Xp on the same machine!!!

Who'da thunkit?

Re:Win XP is very fast

[A Commentor]

I'll bet the benchmarks were run with the settings adjusted for best look.

Wrong... If you would have read the article, it says:

"Performance was measured under both default and optimized versions of the Windows user interface. For optimized testing, the animation and font-smoothing features of both OSes were disabled, as was Windows XP's System Restore feature."

I am not a MS fan but,

[CrackElf]

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).

Re:Uuh, I'm amazed!

[Safety Cap]

Please tell me even one Windows which was faster than its predecessor?

Yes, it's true: Windows 386 was faster than Windows 1.0 (or Windows 286, i.e., Windows 2.0).

Numerical FUD

[spellcheckur]

I have to question the validity of any simulation that thinks that 100% of the average user's 8 hour work day is spent doing things that a computer isn't orders of magnitude too fast for.

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?)

Re:Numerical FUD

[Velex]

FUD is a fact of life. As a hacker I don't like FUD, either, but it should be clear that you can't fight Microsoft FUD with conventional or even logical arguments. FUD, sadly, is the only way to go.

Microsoft is scared shitless about open source, and what it can do to its unethical monopoly. Calling Microsoft's FUD for what it is hasn't even made them flinch. The only thing that management listens to, after all, is FUD, so what reason should stop Open Source from making FUD arguments against the Evil Empire?

Let's face it, people in management and people who don't know better have only emotions to rely upon. I don't see anything particulary wrong with creating some FUD to cloud those emotions and make them look at the facts that Microsoft is run by a megalomaniac who wants to have legal authority to basically become the first global internet government, supported by taxes like renewable licensing.

Not enough information

[samael]

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.

the performance hit is worth it (for me anyway)

[peachboy]

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.

Microsoft Windows XP Operating System: Usability S

[webword]

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?

Re:Win XP is very fast

[_UnderTow_]

If you read the article closely you'd see that they ran the tests with a stock UI (eye cany on) and an optimized UI (eye candy turned off)

Maybe InfoWorld is afraid

[ch-chuck]

that if the present trend continues they'll have to change their name to MicrosoftWorld.

SMP Advantage???

[Gregoyle]

Our tests on a dual-CPU system indicate that both Windows XP and Windows 2000 run better on an SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) configuration with relatively slow CPUs than on a single-CPU system with a screamingly fast processor.

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.

Taco's choice of storyline

[tmark]

Anybody else find it funny that Taco didn't decide to make the title "InfoWorld says Win2k is much faster than WinXP" ??

XP a boon for laptop users

[denovich]

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.

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 .97a My desktop machines at work are running Linux and Solaris.

Re:XP a boon for laptop users

[geekoid]

that is pretty causal, don't you think?

you can not be using MS products, and call your self a loyal Linux user. Maybe regular Linux user, or Linux fan, but not Loyal.

I would love to see XP cose. I will bet that they are violating there earlier anti-compete contract that have with a certian company they developed a UNIX OS for.

Well it *IS* slower in many cases.

[tcc]

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?

Re:Well it *IS* slower in many cases.

[geekoid]

They do it so even stupider people will think they understand computers.
I swear it seems like that ther goal, get the stupidest people you van imagine to call them elfs engineers.

Re:Well it *IS* slower in many cases.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

whats easier, you idiot? a pro figuring out how to turn off some features, or a newbie trying to figure out how to turn them on? its obviously better having it on by default.

Did you read his post at all? He was talking about the pro version, and the fact that these things were still defaulted to "on" in that. He carefully said he wasn't talking about the home version, which is the one aimed at newbies.

Look for more than one review

[MilTan]

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!

Re:Look for more than one review

[geekoid]

Speaking of FUD:
I read the firing squad article, and XP looses to 2k in all but 4 test(all running pentium btw).
but at the conclusion they say:
"Most of the scores were either on par with Win2K or better than it"

So either they are looking for ms revenue, or the guy who reads there conclusion doesn;t read the article and look at the graphs.

As the old saying goes...

[ptomblin]

Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away.

It Feels like 1995 Again.

[jellomizer]

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

Re:It Feels like 1995 Again.

[Archanagor]

And-- I would disagree with those that say it will kill the need for Linux/Unix.

If anything, it will feed the need.

Why? That obnoxious "check with Mr. Gates" licensing scheme. I'm sorry, but I do not feel that when I install software I should report in to the manufacturer that I've used their product-- or that I've used their product again on a different machine.

Keep in mind: I like Windows. I'm not a Linux zealot. I've been pro-Microsoft in the past, but this is just the straw that broke the camel's back. I cannot believe they are abusing consumers in a way never thought of before. As W2k gets older, and Linux gets better I will probably be more inclined than ever to put Linux on my machine as it's only OS.

They force you to pay per machine for windows, but they still keep the price stratospheric. Unbelievable!

Mod me down as being off topic, but I had to get that off my chest.

PR Disaster in the making

[Jeppe Salvesen]

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.

53 minutes

[JMZero]

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).

XP isnt slower, Windows Networking is Faster/smart

[BrookHarty]

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)

interesting omission & benchmark dubiousness

[vlad_petric]

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.

Re:And MacOS X...

[Reckless Visionary]

Sure, yes, I'd like to try 10.1. Right now that isn't an option at work.

But, I guess I don't understand what graphics your NT box can't display. Sure, I understand some Photoshop processes will be better on a Mac, and you don't want to be playing 3d shooter games on NT4, but other than that I don't really understand the difference in capabilities. It seems I can use gimp or photoshop on my NT machine just as easily and speedily as my Mac.

Configuration?

[yamla]

This document is meaningless without knowing more about their test setup. They list the CPUs of each computer but do not mention how much RAM each has. Consider the possibility that each machine has 64 megs of RAM. Unlikely, yes, but it would explain these results. Or perhaps the hard drives are set up with DMA enabled in Win2k and not enabled in WinXP.

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.

OT: ClearType

[Breace]

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.

Re:Win XP is very fast

[geekoid]

they tested with eyecandy on and off.RTFA

Which versions?

[Rick the Red]

Which versions of Windows did they use? There are four versions of Windows 2000 and two versions of Windows XP. I assume they used Windows 2000 Professional, but did they? They don't say. And did they use XP Professional or XP Home Edition?

Would it make a difference? It should, otherwise why pay $100 more for XP Professional?

So for most people it will be faster.

[Anton Anatopopov]

Since most people will only get XP on a new machine, for the vast majority of people, their experience will be of a faster OS. Albeit not as fast as 98 or ME could have been on the same hardware, but nonetheless faster, and with better functionality.

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

Typical /. anti-MS FUD

[Diamon]

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.

How much RAM????

[Col. Panic]

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.

software developer?

[quartz]

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.

Re:software developer?

[Trepidity]

The point remains that UIs are an important part of software design (as something great that has a shitty interface is still shitty for the user), so someone who calls themselves a "professional software developer" should be familiar with at least the basics of various UI types, of which the GUI is one. Certainly the Windows GUI is not the only or the only significant GUI, but it is one used by millions of people, which provides a large dataset from which to determine its successes and failures...that sort of insight is valuable if one wants to design GUIs, regardless of whether one wants to actually program Windows GUIs.

Re:software developer?

[quartz]

You can go on making assumptions about how software is somehow tied to PCs and Windows and GUIs, but that will not make all the mainframes and workstations and servers of the world dissappear. One operating system? Hah. Which one are you talking about? Irix, Solaris, AIX, AUX, Linux, QNX, HP-UX, BSD, OS/X? Dude, wake up. If there are programmers out there who only use one operating system, they are developing Windows software. Only Windows developers can be so ignorant and self-sufficient as to think that their OS is the ONLY OS.

Well, so far it seems faster to me

[friday2k]

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 ...

Re:Well, so far it seems faster to me

[friday2k]

Nope, it is a update install. So all the old sh** is still there. It really does feel faster. Again, this is not scientific. This is only my feeling.

Who cares? This is totally academic...

[wrinkledshirt]

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.

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 .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?).

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...

10 seconds? Get that watch fixed...

[Wonko42]

On my Athlon 950MHz with 384MB of RAM and a UDMA 66 drive, I counted slightly less than two (that's two) seconds between the time I clicked on "Search" and when the search window popped up and was fully ready to go. This is on Windows XP Pro with all the eye-candy turned on.

Sounds like you've either got faulty hardware or a faulty stopwatch, pal.

Have you interviewed a brand-new BSCS lately?

[jcr]

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

Re:Have you interviewed a brand-new BSCS lately?

[Amazing Quantum Man]

who can't even tell you why qsort beats a bubble sort?

Only in the average case. For certain pathological cases, qsort is O(N^2).

Heapsort has a larger coefficient, but is O(N log N) for all cases.

Re:Time machine?

[geekoid]

Taking for granted that the nuumber hold true for you two(doubtfull) you project would be done 11% faster, you'd be seen as a 'driving force', you'd get that bonus and promotion you've always wanted.
That will ead to the red sports car yopu've been eyeing, which will lead to dating hot models.
so I gues the moral of the story is "be sure everyone but you run XP"

can't find em'

[jon_c]

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

Re:can't find em'

[interiot]

microsoft's list of XP reviews

my list of XP reviews

The Video Card Makes all the difference...

[big_groo]

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.

See? Linux will never compete with Windows.

[MongooseCN]

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!

Re:See? Linux will never compete with Windows.

[WillSeattle]

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!

Have to agree with this. Everyone knows that we need to emulate MSFT in every way. Take .NET - we need a slow, thick client like that to suck up all the privacy rights of everyone.

Instead, we have things like Ximian running on a faster more capable OS. How can we possibly compete? And it will work on old hardware even - where's the profit factor in that?

Next thing you know we'll actually get functional speech recognition that people can actually use.

We need to rethink our priorities to compete, no?

Re:See? Linux will never compete with Windows.

[kin_korn_karn]

This is kind of redundant, but the angle is a bit different.

There's more truth to what you say than you think. If it wasn't for the bloat of Windows, people wouldn't have any kind of satisfaction with a PC purchase. They would see their neighbor's/coworker's computer and see that it's just as fast as the $2000 super-box they just bought, and think, "I got ripped off! Computers really ARE all the same!"

What hasn't been said is that there are whole subsets of the population that don't NEED a computer at home. They got by fine without one for years, and they will again. They may not have wanted one in the first place, except to talk to Jimmy at school or see new pics of the grandchildren.

So, instead of deciding to use the machine they have and learn and all that stuff that -we- love, they take the thing back to [consumer electronics store of choice] because they don't like being "ripped off". It's not a matter of utility for these people, it becomes PERSONAL. Ignorant people take everything personally.

Then, you have a pissed off person who tells his/her pissed off friends, and it all leads to is a social rift between computer lovers and the general public, and an economic crash in the technology market.

Or, if they're more level-headed and decide they need a machine, they take back the $2000 super-Presario and get a $500 e-machine, because "it does things just as fast".

How many people do you know that have lost their jobs recently? Even if they found another one. That's all a result of this kind of technology backlash. When you get into the business of tech, you're talking about some serious stuff, so speak lightly..

Remote desktop

[CaptainSuperBoy]

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.

Independence test

[wytcld]

"independently of Microsoft: CNET/ZDNET, eTesting Labs, eWeek, PC Magazine, and PC World"

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."

Re:Windows XP upgrade sounds like a poor idea

[4of12]

Same here.

As a diehard Linux user I bought a copy of 95 just due to its sheer ubiquity. Not stable, not secure, but useful due to how much shrink-wrapped consumer software will run on it.

First thing I did when I heard about XP coming with its licensing and registration was to immediately get my 2nd and last MS OS - Win 2K.

I'm incredulous that corporations are giving in to the License Agreement arm-twisting to "upgrade" from 2K to XP. Win 2K seems like a fine, stable, good performing OS. It's being retired before its time, if you ask me. Guess it was too good to become obsolete sufficiently fast. Now that MS OS are of tolerable stability and quality they don't want anyone using them for any indefinite length of time.

Not really a test of the OS itself

[Dahan]

They're benchmarking Office on Win2K and WinXP, which is certainly a valid thing to do, but it's not the whole picture. Office does a lot of UI stuff, and with all the fancy alpha blending and whatnot in XP's UI, it's slower.

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...

Cleartype for Windows 2000

[1010011010]

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...

Re:And MacOS X...

[John_Booty]

My computer at Work (Win NT) is constantly getting blue screens, unexpected errors (access violation), and other freezes

I'm not doubting your word, I fully believe, but your experience is absolutely contrary to the norm.

Myself, and literally everyone else I know (quite a few programmers), gets weeks and weeks if not months of uptime with WinNT. If you're getting instability with WinNT, something is fscked up with your computer- drivers, hardware, something. That's not normal for NT at all... of course, I dunno what you're doing with that machine...

Double Edged OS

[swordboy]

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?



UNRELATED CONTENT

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.

Amen

[Da Masta]

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.

Re:And MacOS X...

[TheAwfulTruth]

I'll second that and add that our macs here crash daily. And a crashed mac app almost always requires a reboot. And if you dare coding on a mac, plan on rebooting about 50 times a day. Ugh :( Our windows and linux servers are about equal in uptime. The development windows and linux boxes are also about equal. (End user windows machines are terrible, but noone here cares to try to prevent the users from installing any old app and adspam screen saver they find on the net ) But the Macs, oh boy. I acutally believe a lot of the hype in absense of fact, but personally dealing with Mac development and use has done nothing but remove every last vestige of respect I ever had for the platform.

So? It's still the most widely used biz app

[coyote-san]

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?

XP is not bad at all

[honer]

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'll raise a dumb point in their "defense"

[jht]

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).

Who Knows?

[EvilJohn]

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.

I'm just gonna throw this one out there.

[blazerw11]

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.

Re:I'm just gonna throw this one out there.

[bonehead]

What's strange is that I've upgraded 5 different people from 2K to XP. All 5 have commented glowingly about how much faster XP is. This also coincides with the impression I got from testing it on my own machine.

Of course, this is all just anecdotal, but I still think describing XP as "painfully" slower than 2K is a bit of a stretch. (Just wish I hadn't lost MIDI capability altogether.)

Re:I'm just gonna throw this one out there.

[tps12]

That's a well-known fact of UI design, that users will make wrong statements about speed, rate of errors, and so forth, when using an interface they actually enjoy. This is why anecdotal "evidence" is next to useless in this case.

ridiculous extrapolation

[macpeep]

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.

Re:XP isnt slower, Windows Networking is Faster/sm

[Trepidity]

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?

Try this one

[Billly Gates]

here or here.

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.

NO CHANGE to the UI

[sethop]

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.

Malda Flamebaiting?

[Null_Packet]

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.

Re:Malda Flamebaiting?

[jamie]

Give it time.

The quality of discussion on Slashdot did start to suck somewhere between when I first started reading (my original UID is 4847) and its low point sometime last year. The site's just been a victim of its own success; there is no other place where so many people are so vocal, and there are inherent problems with discussion forums of this size. Nobody else has solved these problems that I know of, so we're figuring things out as we go. I totally agree with you when you write:

"the features and overall content of Slashdot is quite nice, but the size and readership/discovery of Slashdot is what has driven it downhill"

But -- it has been getting consistently better, and is now much better than it was six months or a year ago. I've been working on Slash moderation code, so I've been reading the comments obsessively. I'm seeing the same quality of discussion now at +1 that used to be found only at +2, which is actually a huge jump. The next step is to make +4 and +5 into what they should be :)

Stick around. If it bugs you too much to read now, come back in another six months and start reading again; I bet you'll like what you find.

Microsoft's official numbers

[Kraft]

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?

XP ==

[dbretton]

Xtra Pokey...

Its the optimization.

[Zeinfeld]

The main differences between XP and W2K are the market they are optimized for and the level of Win 98 backwards compatibility.

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

Re:IBM confirms this with recent study

[spongman]

jesus, named pipes are for networking not for IPC. shows how much IBM know about win32 programming. CreateNamedPipe() creates a pipe that is accessible across a network, whereas the results of UNIX's pipe() command are only accessible within that process (until it's forked). there are much better ways of doing IPC on windows than using named pipes.

Re:XP isnt slower, Windows Networking is Faster/sm

[Trepidity]

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.

Gaming in XP....

[Gurft]

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 ;)

Can anyone explain how article submission works?

[Vryl]

2001-11-01 06:48:17 Windows XP slow slow slow (articles,news) (rejected)

got me buggered.

(Dis)Info(rmation)World

[JesterzWild]

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.

But it's hard to beat an honest man

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

The good ol' days

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My Win95 box on crapy hardware takes 90 seconds to boot, my XP box with great hardware takes fifteen seconds to see the log in screen

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? :-)

Re:What about the flaimbait...

[jamie]

"I asked for editors to stop putting stupid shit in with the stories."

I went back and looked at the stories you referenced, including the one this thread is attached to, and either you're trolling me or you have a very low threshold.

Rob's comment on the launch of Windows XP was "I know this affects a fair number of users but for the life of me I just don't know why." That's flamebait?

On the next article you referenced, Rob remarked: "A mild controvery occured yesterday.... Here is a followup." Flamebait?

Rob's commentary on Microsoft losing their delay appeal was: "The link doesn't say much more than that the appeals court denied the delay."

And his writeup of this story is just-the-facts too.

There's no stupid shit. You imagined it I guess. Or you just have a problem with us running any stories about Microsoft at all. I'm annoyed that I got involved in this discussion, since I had hoped some constructive criticism would come out of it. Not from you apparently.

"I seriously think at this point this may be the last time I read Slashdot for quite a while..."

See ya.

You say this, I say that...

[crashnbur]

(1) Slashdot seems to post an awful lot of anti-Microsoft propoganda for a site that seems not to use Microsoft products much, if at all.

(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.

Re:Can anyone explain how article submission works

[Vryl]

Can anyone explain to me why PEOPLE ALWAYS WHINGE AND WHINGE ABOUT NOT GETTING THEIR STORIES POSTED?

Simple really.

We like /. We like to contribute to the site and it's community. In return, we like to recognized. And nobody likes queue jumpers. And it galls, and demoralizes when our submissions are initially rejected and then later accepted. It seems silly, illogical and it pisses ppl off.

Re:Can anyone explain how article submission works

[EnglishTim]

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.

Re:Windows XP upgrade sounds like a poor idea

[4of12]

They're not. Corporations would most likely get the "Corporate" version, which doesn't require WPA. WPA is primarily an issue for home users.

It's not the WPA that's the problem for corporate users. It's the terms of the Licensing, which "encourage" you to upgrade to XP to save on future licensing and support costs associated with sticking to 2K until you decide you're good and ready to upgrade from 2K. Now, however, the pricing structure has been used like a mallet to ever-so-subtly encourage the "upgrade".

Home users do have to contend with WPA, but I'm not certain they even need to do that since the OS installation on new computers was likely done at the factory.

No, the typical casual home user only has to worry about the nagware for MSN and Passport and the MP3 encoding degradation.

Re:Can anyone explain how article submission works

[Vryl]

Actually, I am a professional, trained whinger. I have whinged and whinged and whinged on a few things in my time, with a near 100% success rate, most recently kicking out a government and getting their policies reversed.

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 /. and if I can, I would like to help change them. Whinging can help, imnsho.