Slashdot Mirror
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.
Does anyone doubt that, say, Word 95 installed on Windows 95 would run circles around Word XP on Windows XP (on the same hardware)? I hope not. You can call it bloat, but there's probably a reason why people (not just "lusers", but also "power users" who "know better") keep upgrading anyways.
This is the foundation of the Wintel monopoly: Harness ever-expanding software to Moore's law and reap the benefits. We don't have to like it, but at this point its not a surprise either. Maybe instead we should try to understand why it's been so successful.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Ok, so I'm not exactly a microsoft fan but I got XP professional recently because as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how it works, and what it does...
But I'm suprised because I subjectivly find it works noticably faster than 2000 seemed to do. Programs seem to load quicker and ot just seems more responsive. Could be because I reformatted and defragmented my disk I suppose.
Have to agree with the comments about moveing things around. Not a problem for me, but it did take me ages to find a few things first time.
Sig is taking a break!
Gotta love how they say how linux is too hard to switch users too but dont mention that Microsoft does the exact same thing every 2 years to their user interface.
What a load.
XP is the first time since Windows 95 that Microsoft has made a major change in the look and feel of the GUI. As 95 begat 98 which begat ME (and NT 4 begat 2000) minor things have changed such as the placement of the Windows Explorer icon and a Control Panel group or two, but the same basic grey bar at the bottom of the screen with the start button has always remained.
Every 2 years? Complete FUD.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Slashdot is so predictable. The second I, and many other people who enjoy knowledge over ignorance, read the Infoworld benchmarks... I knew that Slashdot would post these, and ONLY these, and ignore the many other benchmarks that show WinXP performs as good if not better than 2k.
... nah ... InfoWorld was trying to make XP lose. Don't believe me? Consider this: The following organizations have tested XP, independently of Microsoft: CNET/ZDNET, eTesting Labs, eWeek, PC Magazine, and PC World. All these independent labs came to the same conclusion: XP meets or exceeds the performance of Win2K and Win9x. The InfoWorld results are also at odds with real-world XP use, which already includes hundreds of thousands of beta testers, tens of thousands of IT professionals and developers, and hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers. "Microsoft has not received any indications that users are experiencing reduced performance compared with Windows 2000," a company spokesperson said. "We have had extensive feedback that Windows XP is better performing than Windows 9x." Go figure. And yet, you just know that every anti-Microsoft site on the planet is going to run with the InfoWorld story and not any of the positive stories. Ain't life grand?"
For instance, here is what Paul from WinInformant has to say:
"InfoWorld stood alone this week when it declared that Windows XP significantly underperformed Windows 2000 and Windows 9x in its tests. Not only do the controversial InfoWorld results fly in the face of Microsoft's published results and actual real-world use, they refute every independent XP performance test performed to date. One gets the idea that
Looks like he hit that nail right on the head, huh?
But without the typos, it wouldn't be salshdto!
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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?)
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.
Karma: Professionally Doomed (mostly affected by inability to keep opinions to self)
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.
Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
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)
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.
Besides, as has been mentioned already, a system that performs 11% slower than another only means 53 minutes out of an 8 hour day if your CPU is 100% busy all the time.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
In my defense, Taco edited the piss out of what I posted. It was error-free when I sent it in.
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
Independently of the big three automakers, ExxonMobile says, "We objectively consider the newest crop of SUVs to be the most wonderful ever, and urge their immediate purchase by all."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
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.
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.
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.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.