Wow, Difference is night and day

Just logged back into XP after using Vista and Win7 and all I have to say is the difference is night and day. Sure XP is heavily out dated, GUI wise, but the speed is just insane on XP.

Windows takes a bit longer to load on XP than Win7, but XP runs a lot quicker. Such as the program uninstall in the control panels, loads quicker on XP, and picture thumbnails loads after in XP, and loading different aps loads faster. (Firefox, office, photoshop etc etc.)

Just runs smoother in XP. Don't know how the explain it, but after putting XP on hold for a month or so, and just using it now, you can clearly feel the difference.

Anyways, I will still rid my Vista partition and replace it with a fresh Win7 install when it comes out. I will keep XP and toss Vista. On both my Laptop and Desktop.

 

ME is a lot faster than XP on my machine.

 

Thanks for the input, I have Windows Xp and have been wondering how windwows 7 compares in speed.

 

hm here xp is slower than vista. i must live in a strange world

not really. but vista is more snappy than xp to me. yes, xp is faster sometimes, but i very often have the "click *wait* it reacts", and it's random. sometimes it reacts imediately, sometimes it takes up to seconds to just open the startmenu as an example.

vista is constant, and very fast. looks like you had some problems with your installation that made it slow.

 

May it's the HD caching thing. Doesn't Vista store most used program memory to the HD or something?

 

ME and W98 have a problem with the newer current hardware, so thats not an option for most users now

If your hardware has drivers for xp, I find it feels slightly faster than vista
Software is more compatable as well,thats the main reason I still use it

Vista is more secure ,looks better,and if you have the right hardware,reasonably fast enough


Alex

 

I pulled out my old Aspire 3680 (T1350 @ 1.87Ghz) to see how Windows 7 would run on an older machine. I was in a rush so it wasn't too thorough but I ran Wprime and got 97.4sec @ 32M on XP and 93.8sec @ 32M for Vista. Both were clean installations with most updated drivers. XP still has the faster loading times but Win7 was all around snappier with the exception of when all GUI thingos were enabled. After disabling one or two of the more intensive options Win7 was about the same speed as XP with all basic operations.

Not exactly sure what could explain for the Wprime results but i'll try some more tests over the weekend to see what I get.

 

XP is also having this problem now and it is only going to get worse, hence the reason for a new OS and not building on a Dinosaur.

 

I prefer Vista over XP. From my experience Vista is more pleasant and smooth than XP. I can understand some programs (especially games) can run faster in XP but I don't mind and the difference is not that much (unnoticeable to me). As a matter of fact, I find XP slower overall than Vista because of the UI structure. But to be honest I had to reinstall vista and remove all the 3rd party software that came with it in order to make it fast and stable.

 

I also live in that strange world as Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit is noticably faster than Windows XP on my M1330

 

I must live in a strange world also. It seems that for me Vista is a lot faster then XP..weird..eh?

 

Another thread between XP and Vista. Do you want to hear more?

 

don't we all love vista-bashing? (or anti-bash-fighting in my case..).

well, happy weekend, and fun for everyone with their choise of os.

 

Just speaking from personal experience. No need to cry about it. Vista lovers are almost as bad as the Sega Saturn Lovers. haha

 

That was eaiser to do then I figured it would be.

 

Not counting a bug in the beta that doubled Win7's start time, they actually seem decently close to me. XP actually starts faster for me (even though it's an older install), but interface-wise the only thing that seems slow in Win7 is the animated maximize/minimize, which is easily disabled. (sidenote: I still don't see what the benefit of that is, nor why it's so popular on OSX ) If I had to say which one was snappier, it would definitely be XP, but Win7 isn't a slouch. It's definitely better than Vista. Vista's Start Menu especially took forever to load. And with hardly any programs installed, too!

Basically it's close enough that the interface improvements in Win7 could make up the difference. Search helps a lot with that - I love the search bar that I keep finding. But there's a few other areas (such as right-click close an item on the taskbar) where XP has a clear advantage in terms of speedy user interface. So I'm not sure which one really is more efficient for me.

Add/Remove programs, though, is faster in Win7 by a huge margin for me. But I'm on a two-day-old Win7 install (reinstalled to fix the slow boot bug), versus a regular XP install, and I'm used to a 5-year-old XP install for that dialog. So it's not really a fair comparison.

What I can't stand about Win7 is how much it uses the hard drive. XP is nice and quiet when you aren't loading something. Win7 occasionally, especially after startup, starts hitting the hard drive for several minutes like a crazed horse would drink water after crossing the desert. And trying to keep it from doing that is playing Whack-A-Mole - I thought I'd solved it with no indexing or SuperFetch, but a couple days later it was at it again. It may be enough to keep me using XP as my main OS until SSD's are standard - which would mean running just XP until 2011 or 2012. But I'd been planning to do that anyway until the public beta of Win7 was announced. And I'm still discovering handy new features in XP - I've learned more about XP than Win7 this week.

That said, I already tossed Vista long ago. I'd much rather have Win7 and XP than XP and Vista - I really plan to never ever use Vista again if possible. It's been over a year free of the scourge so far.

WPrime doesn't really mean much in terms of real performance, though. It's a good general indicator of processor power, but in terms of snappiness it really doesn't indicate much of anything. Vista has always beaten XP in wPrime, but that's certainly not true in most other performance metrics, or necessarily how snappy it was.

It's not really that bad with XP yet though. It's still quite operable on most new computers. But you're right, it is going to get worse, barring a Vista-esque Win7 flop (and then it probably will anyway due to lost Linux/Mac share).

 

agreed with most here after vista i would never go back to xp

 

Meh, you XP doesn't hold a candle to my 2K

 

Funny this is the way Vista reacts for me but not Win7.

 

There is nothing wrong with Vista. Use it every day and its in all ways just as fast as XP.

 

Vista was faster than XP for me.

 

I notice no difference in performance from vista to XP, so i choose vista due to its kernel being the future of windows. That and it looks alot better.

As for the outdated hardware, I cant even load XP on my hp unless I want most of my hardware to not work at all.

 

To me, Vista's alright, but I hate the insane boot time on my laptop. Even after tweaks it takes close to 5mins to boot whereas my desktop with XP takes literally 30secs.

 

Going back to xp gives me shivers. Post vista installation never gave me bsod's atfp. Plus I appreciate it being an eye candy alot

 

if it takes close to 5 min to boot Vista on your computer, there's something wrong with your configuration. trust me. whether it is driver related, user-fault, incompatible hardware or whatnot I do not know, bu something IS WRONG.

 

Hmm...looks like I over-exaggerated when I made that post. I decided to check the actual boot times with the boot time thread and apparently my vista (laptop) was only slightly slower than my desktop (xp).

The times were:
Desktop with xp: 52.7 secs
Laptop with vista: 54.6 secs (with plug), 87.6 secs (on battery), 44 secs (with plug, on high performance)

It looks like vista doesn't really load all that much slower, but certainly feels that way because I'm usually booting with the battery. The programs could also take another ~20secs to load up before it's fully functional.

 

win 98 is even faster than XP. period.

 

My trusty MS-DOS will boot way faster than any of your stinky GUI OS's. Command line, FTW.

Gary

The preceding message was brought to you by your friendly local department of facetiousness.

 

I didn't go back to xp for speed. I went back, because Vista's menu's are all goofy. Even if vista was faster, it'd take me more time to do things than it would with xp. As for eye candy, I use windows classic anyways. I have my linux installs for when I want real eye candy.

Menu weirdness: case and point

XP: right click on desktop and the tabed window opens up.

Vista: Right click on desktop, window opens up with options. Click your options and a window with a single tab opens up. Why they left the windows tabbed, but in separate windows completely baffles me.

 

I agree
I use my vista install for internet use
For applications and in general getting things done
XP all the way


Alex

 

Im gonna take a guess here and say most people who say Vista is faster are correct. But this is because most people with vista have NEW computers with Vista, so of course its faster. Nevertheless I am a new Vista user and have no problems and find some of the features ridiculously useful.
(Snipping tool and search boxes everwhere are awesome).

If people get 1GB of ram, a 40GB HD, and try installing a bunch of programs then ya Vista will be bad. But if you have a decent system Vista should be fine. ALOT of the hate is from people who dont know any better (whether their complaints are true or not, they are just following the crowd).

 

Vista gets flak, because it was terrible at launch. Partly Microsoft's fault, partly hardware companies fault. Now Vista just has too bad of a reputation. I just don't like the GUI. I hope Windows 7 changes some things around to make more sense.

 

I guess Windows Vista is good enough to use, after the SP1 launch, which helped a bunch. Also Gaming is a little slower for me on Windows Vista, same on 7 as well. Reasons probably were the game wasn't that optimized, or the NVIDIA driver support wasn't that good, and with that my graphics card isn't that powerful. After switching back from Windows 7 to Windows Vista it seems that the interface is much faster on Windows 7 compared to Vista. Windows XP still seems to be faster as well, however with three operating systems to compare at the moment, there's a whole new world to explore within this interesting journey apart from Windows XP. My brightness switches freeze up the display for a few seconds in Vista anyway, Windows 7 fixed that.

 

wierd cause vista home premium runs better for me than xp xp used to lag all the time, but i spose vista has been heavily optimized for newer hardware such as dual/quad cores etc whereas when xp came out we were still using athlon xps and pentium 4s

 

If you have the latest and greatest laptop/desktop why bog it down with XP. XP users should let go already and embrace the future. When Win7 comes out are you guys going to stay with XP? Good luck trying to find drivers! And Win7 is based on Vista's kernel so transitioning isn't going to be much of a problem. Use your dual core and quad cores to it's fullest.

 

I was thinking the same thing.

 

Ignorance must be bliss.

If win 7 doesn't have a convoluted menu structure, I will use it. Otherwise, linux is already my main OS. XP is only for gaming.

 

I use xp for gaming. osx as my main op. I do agree that xp is fast however i cant help but like windows 7 over windows vista. for some reason vista has run like crap on any system i have ever had and even on fairly powerful ones. it seems like in windows 7 there is a whole lot less goin on. less services, less mem usage, less everything.

i dont know what game compatibility windows 7 has but I think like you i will stick to xp. everything runs on xp and it runs fast.

 

From my weekend Windows 7 experience, I'm quite impressed. I have had a flawless Windows Vista experience though, so I expected W7 to up the bar.

The whole, "Nobody should buy this, XP is the best OS and it shall be supported forever or I'll go on a hunger strike," vs "Drop XP because it is a piece of crap and you suck" BS needs to stop. Everyone just stop talking about it already.

If you have specific experiences or data leading you to upgrade or not upgrade, I'd like to hear it. What I DON'T want to hear is what OS you are going to be using, because in the end, I don't care. The ONLY groups that care are Microsoft's sales and accounting departments and Microsoft's shareholders, so go ahead and email them.

 

actually, vista design is noob-friendly.

if you give XP/vista to a complete newbie..it'd take MUCH more time for him
to learn/find things on winXP than on Vista.

unfortunately, if you build a GUI that is noob-friendly, it is BOUND to be
a pros-get-irritated one. that's the way it is.