Is Vista really slower than XP?

[stevember]

That's an interesting question and a valid position. I can see why it would be considered slowing down user interaction.

The windows fade so fast for me that I don't really have time to even try. Does someone know how long those animations last? One-tenth of a second, perhaps?

On the short-term, that's a really small "delay", but on the long run, yes, it might slow down the user interaction. Animating (minimizing, restoring, closing, opening) 1000 windows, when considering 1/10 of a second for each one, that sums up about 1.67 minutes of interaction the user could be utilizing for other things. Not much time at all, but still time.

Yeah after 5 years you could take tea break. Btw this reply not sarcastic to you just follows your post perfect, its aimed at ones moan window don't close fast enough etc.

In actual fact I'm opening and closing windows so I can gain some time. Dam this post means I gotta do another 345,960,122 (number made up) to get back lost time.

Edited September 19, 2008 by stevember

[hagjohn]

If you have good hardware, Vista should be quick on your computer.

I have Vista on my laptop from day one and it's fast.

Today I installed Vista x64 on my desktop computer. And it's dead slow. HDD is constantly doing something when I'm running other apps (and I disabled indexing and boost) Starting Visual Studio takes 10 times more than XP. And I have 2.2 core2duo with 2gb ram.

So it depends on the computer?

Vista does this for some reason. Give it a day or 2 on your desktop and make sure your using good drivers.

[Apple-a-Day]

Many people say that Vista is a RAM hogger and that it's much slower than XP. I tend to disagree. My new computer that I bought a few months ago really flies. It only has a Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM and that thing is extremely fast. I can even do a virus scan and surf the internet at the same time without any lag. On my older XP computer, a virus scan would slow down the computer tremendously. Not to mention that Vista seems to boot up much faster as well. I just type on my password and poof! The computer is up and running in no time. My friend bought a new computer that's just as powerful as mine and he reformatted it and installed XP. His computer seems to be MUCH slower than mine. Boot up time is slower and there is noticeable lag when multi-tasking.

So tell me, why do people claim that Vista is slower? From my experience, it seems to be much faster.

As a former XP support tech I'll tell ya how I see it. Vista appears to boot faster due to the whole process, it monitors what you use the most and loads them first then loads the other stuff while you are happy with the boot process. Yes vista is fast, when it works right. XP is what it is, its the win 2000 of the next step. Very realiable and predictable. I have a XP, Vista, Server 2008, 2003 OSX, Vista, and Unubtu on my home domain. None is better than the other over all. They all have there plus and minus attributes. the whole OS fanboy thing is totaly over rated. I see it as people finding a confort zone, I test and try anyting that comes my way. Have no faves, will not root for any OS over another.

PS my nick is not my OS of any fave its just what I use for my Neowining

[Malskazz]

Vista X64 is flying on my E8400 machine with 8GB ram..

[bjoswald]

What you running it on? CPU, GPU etc...

Intel Core 2 Duo, Nvidia 7900 GS, 4GB of DDR-2 RAM. Not the greatest, but good enough.

[Maximum Error]

Got to say; Vista Ultimate is running amazing on my XPS m1730 with 4 gigs of RAM!

[micro]

no no and no...

vista is very fast on my system.

Vista business x32

AMD 4200+ Geforce 8800gt

2gb ram

300gb hd 7200

very fast on laptop too.

Vista Home premium x64

Core 2 2ghz

4gb ram

250gb hd

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

I am running Vista Business X32 on a PC with a P4 3.0 Ghz Proc and 3gb of ram with a Video card that has 256mg of ram. It runs great. Firefox is even faster on it.

[micro]

All this talk that vista is slower than xp was started by people who upgraded to vista with a 800mhz cpu and expected it to run fine. :\

Vista is a great os and it runs great for me.

[Ci7]

Vista X64 is flying on my E8400 machine with 8GB ram..

off course it should or there are somethin wrong with you rams :p

[Roger H. Veteran]

I have Vista on my laptop from day one and it's fast.

Today I installed Vista x64 on my desktop computer. And it's dead slow. HDD is constantly doing something when I'm running other apps (and I disabled indexing and boost) Starting Visual Studio takes 10 times more than XP. And I have 2.2 core2duo with 2gb ram.

So it depends on the computer?

You should have double the amount of RAM on x64 because of all the redundancies especially for X86 applications. it needs the RAM for the compatible layer involved.

[markwolfe Veteran]

All this talk that vista is slower than xp was started by people who upgraded to vista with a 800mhz cpu and expected it to run fine. :\

You mean, in other words, "people who have used both XP and Vista on the same system". :shifty:

[PaulCabby]

^Yup basically :p

[Cadium]

It really depends on the hardware that you are running it on.

[Mando]

im still a sp3 xppro user, but only cos i use checkpoint secure remote to vpn to work in emergencies and there one thing I am noticing on an identical machine running vista 64 and same hardware as mine (Q6600,9800GTX+,4gbram 1066,sata2s) his usage of cpu 3+4 is much higher than my machine in XP pro.

the machine also seems to be a lot smoother than my machine overall.

Having Dx10, media centre extensions and better CPU usage and everything in this sub-topic has prompted me to buy Vista. Should be here Monday :D

[Mrs_Angel_D]

Vista has runs great on my computer, I bought it with vista preinstalled and I've not had a problem :D

[betasp]

Stick to the question... Is Vista slower than XP??? On the same system, the answer is YES. It does not matter the hardware (unless we are talking over 4GB RAM). It does not matter what your specs are, or how Vista runs on your system, if I go and put XP on it and benchmark it, overall it will be faster with XP.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Stick to the question... Is Vista slower than XP??? On the same system, the answer is YES. It does not matter the hardware (unless we are talking over 4GB RAM). It does not matter what your specs are, or how Vista runs on your system, if I go and put XP on it and benchmark it, overall it will be faster with XP.

As a counter-point, if you are very happy with your Vista performance, does it matter much if XP would benchmark a little faster?

Like I said earlier, Vista's security improvements (down to the kernel) make it worth-while. (again, as long as you have a system it runs well on)

[anonymous_user]

Stick to the question... Is Vista slower than XP??? On the same system, the answer is YES.

Hit the nail on the head :)

[Roger H. Veteran]

Stick to the question... Is Vista slower than XP??? On the same system, the answer is YES. It does not matter the hardware (unless we are talking over 4GB RAM). It does not matter what your specs are, or how Vista runs on your system, if I go and put XP on it and benchmark it, overall it will be faster with XP.

I don't care what some benchmark says. I run Office 2007 on my laptop doing work (and homework for friends i might add) and i defintiely rather doing it on my machine even when compared to theirs (IBM Thinkpad T61 with a Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz and XP). They always notice how Vista performs better, even when just browsing the internet.

You did say overall it will be but it hasn't been in that case for me. Vista has always been faster in the things i do. So much so that the above machine (and my girlfriends Dell Inspiron 6000 with a Pentium M 1.8Ghz, 2GB RAM) is now running Vista Business instead of XP. She (GF) laughs at her friends that still use XP and she's even gotten her mom to buy a Vista PC cuz she hates her mom interupting our time together to come to her house to fix her PC cuz it's riddled with spyware :) Surely it can happen on Vista too but that's where the built in security comes in handy :)

[Sir Topham Hatt]

I recently changed from XP to Vista and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change. The only thing I have noticed is I can run more programs than usual, this more than likely going from a 2.6Ghz to a 3 Ghz dual core.

Ripping CDs and writing mp3 files is a lot quicker indeed.

Still gte this error with internet explorer though:

[DaDude]

I recently changed from XP to Vista and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change. The only thing I have noticed is I can run more programs than usual, this more than likely going from a 2.6Ghz to a 3 Ghz dual core.

Ripping CDs and writing mp3 files is a lot quicker indeed.

Still gte this error with internet explorer though:

I had that same problem. I started that topic a while ago and people though it was unusual. So people here came to the conclusion that it was a virus or some spyware. One of my friends had the same problem as well and so did you. Also, my computer was new at the time, so it can?t be a virus or spyware, especially if other people are experiencing the exact same thing.

Solution: Switch to Mozilla Firefox. Ever since I switched, I never had that problem again.

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

Stick to the question... Is Vista slower than XP??? On the same system, the answer is YES. It does not matter the hardware (unless we are talking over 4GB RAM). It does not matter what your specs are, or how Vista runs on your system, if I go and put XP on it and benchmark it, overall it will be faster with XP.

Not on my machine.

[xpgeek]

All depends on the hardware you run it on.

I run Vista x64 on a dual core Pentium D with 3gb of ddr2 5300 ram, and it really flys. Some things were faster in XP for me, like booting up, XP booted up wayy faster then Vista for me, but, once it is booted Vista is just so much more stable for sooo much longer that never have to reboot anyway.

If have decent hardware, Vista all the way.

[Shadrack]

I couldn't tell any difference in speed between XP Pro and Vista Home Premium 32bit on my Pentium 4 3.0Ghz w/ 2GB of ram. I think if you have less ram, you'll notice it more as Vista does require more. If your disk has to make up the difference, and therefore you get endless thrashing of the hard drive than that will slow you down substantially.

I get about the same frame rates for games in Vista as I did in XP on that machine. I would consider a P4 to be the bare minimum anyone should consider installing Vista on.

My Quad-Core runs Vista Ultimate 64 like a dream.

I'm not sure what all the "Vista is slower than XP" fuss is. Probably stemming from people who chose to do an "upgrade" install ontop of XP as oppose to a clean install. I wish Microsoft would figure out how to get that right.