Is Vista really slower than XP?

[Tech God]

Welcome to the technology world, just like software, hardware should eventually be upgraded too. Technology is a constantly advancing field in all aspects, you can't expect old hardware to always be able to run the newest software. You also can't bash every OS that comes out in the next 50 years because you are too stubborn to upgrade from your 200Mhz IBM thinkpad.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Welcome to the technology world, just like software, hardware should eventually be upgraded too. Technology is a constantly advancing field in all aspects, you can't expect old hardware to always be able to run the newest software. You also can't bash every OS that comes out in the next 50 years because you are too stubborn to upgrade from your 200Mhz IBM thinkpad.

Condescend much?

[bobbytomorow]

Vista is slower than XP, period. XP is faster running apps and especially running games pretty well across the board regardless of hardware configuration. Nearly every benchmark comparison on the web proves this.

[Denis W. Veteran]

XP may be marginally faster. Some apps open up faster on XP, but some don't. (especially Firefox, it's sometimes faster on Vista)

What really got me back to Vista on my laptop was the clumsy wireless experience in XP:

A balloon says: Wireless networks not available.

Me: The wireless switch's off, you idiot.

A balloon says: Local Area Connection's not connected.

Me: Because I'm on a wireless network, you idiot.

A balloon says: Now connected to (home wireless network).

Me: ...

:pinch:

On top of that, no isolating networking settings between different networks.

Also contrary to what I thought earlier, the FPS drop for games in XP and Vista wasn't as high as I thought it was. I was going by benchmarks of Half Life 2 in XP. Then I saw how low the FPS was in Vista for Portal and thought it was Vista's fault. :p

[Churma]

Well on my rig with Vista sp1 it smokes my XP partition. The only thing slow, is the boot time. I always leave my computer in standby so its not an issue unless I have to reboot for patch Tuesday. I have now moved away from XP all together except for in VM land where I strip drm off songs I bought. =P

Edited September 22, 2008 by Mikee4fun

[CyberWolf]

At work we deal with many hardware specs. I have machines that are 300mhz with 64Mg ram to C2D running at 2.33Ghz with 2Gb ram.

Vista SP1 makes a huge difference.

I run the following:

Home:

Intel C2D E8400

Gigabyte P35 DS3

4 Gig Patriot 800mhz

NV8800GT

Vista Ultimate x64

Laptop:

Dell Latitude D630

Intel C2D Memron @ 2.13

Intel P965

2 gig Kingston 667mhz

Vista Ultimate x32

Laptop2:

Dell Latitude D620

Intel C2D 2.13

Intel 945

1gig Kingston 667

Vista Business

My home machine screams. There it runs everything as fast or faster than XP

Laptop is fast I have no complaints everything is responsive and I wait for nothing on it.

Laptop2 is the shocker... It is the fast machine I have vs specs. It runs vista surprisingly fast. Having only 1 gig of ram does not seem to effect its performance at all. It actually "feels" faster than my main laptop with 2 gig ram.

I believe that vista has some built in scaling or self tuning for speed and specs. I was astounded when I installed vista on laptop 2 and its performance was = to a laptop that was a year newer and had double the ram. I will admit that Vista pre SP1 was not that great but SP1 did make a huge difference. Ive run side by side comparisons on identical hardware vista sp1 vs xp pro sp3 and found that vista performed on par and in some regards it was faster than XP. What I have found to be even better however is Server 08 converted to work station. It out shines them all. It runs better on my various platforms better than vista and XP both. It out performed XP on my athlon 3200+ workstation with 2gig ram which really surprised me. The only reason I don't run it completely is that certain multimedia plug-ins don't work in the server OS yet, wont even install.

and Bobbytomorow... Ill put my vista gaming rig up against any equal machine running XP. Tuned my vista gaming rig is a beast... I play lots of CSS and un-tuned under stress test... 292 fps: in game @ 1680x1050 all settings high with 8xaa 16xaf I average 160+fps and will top out at 299fps

[bobbytomorow]

and Bobbytomorow... Ill put my vista gaming rig up against any equal machine running XP. Tuned my vista gaming rig is a beast... I play lots of CSS and un-tuned under stress test... 292 fps: in game @ 1680x1050 all settings high with 8xaa 16xaf I average 160+fps and will top out at 299fps

Funny that Vista out performs XP for you yet every other benchmark on the web says otherwise. Its also common sense that an os with a much higher overhead will perform slower on the same hardware configuration as an os with a low overhead. Its not rocket science.

btw I run Vista Ultimate and Business as well as XP across a variety of configurations myself.

[NEVER85]

Funny that Vista out performs XP for you yet every other benchmark on the web says otherwise. Its also common sense that an os with a much higher overhead will perform slower on the same hardware configuration as an os with a low overhead. Its not rocket science.

btw I run Vista Ultimate and Business as well as XP across a variety of configurations myself.

Omg the intarwebz sez XP is faster!!1

[Happy-Dude]

Yes, if you have the right machine (modern and in the last 1-2 years), you are pretty much set to run a great Vista machine (though, XP might just run faster on certain tasks).

That is my only other complain about not running Vista, old hardware (my PC) would be slaughtered if I ran it. My other is that I'm just familiar with XP (which is my main reason), and I know where almost everything is and how to tweak it to my liking.

Vista's not bad (I've used it, liked it, but also had really aggravating experiences with it, though I'm sure I can tweak it to my liking if I had the chance). Always could be better.

Vista's memory and process management, from what I know, is just different. With more, the better and efficient the system is. With less, it is buggy.

I just really hope Windows 7 is optimized with 32-bit single cores, for those who are coming from the early XP ages. (Hoping for a separate version dedicated to us.) I want to keep up to date, but with how things are looking, I might just have to stick with XP (not bad until 2014) and work around with *nix environments afterwards...

[bob_c_b]

What new version of Windows has ever run great on older hardware, and hasn't run massively better on newer hardware with fresh drivers tweaked for the new OS? Why argue about it?

[thealexweb]

I simple test i did to prove it, I have a Dell Optiplex GX 260 with Pentium 4 2.00Ghz and 768MB ram. Under XP it runs fine, under vista boot time was around 5 minutes. Point proven.

[markwolfe Veteran]

I simple test i did to prove it, I have a Dell Optiplex GX 260 with Pentium 4 2.00Ghz and 768MB ram. Under XP it runs fine, under vista boot time was around 5 minutes. Point proven.

To be honest, that only "proves" a specific setup. I would expect to see similar results on other systems < 1GB of RAM. Especially if some is removed by shared memory for video.

And boot time, while a good indicator here, is not a very good metric for a booted, running OS. Some benchmarks can be run to get a better idea.

Testing on a quad-core 64-bit system with 8GB+ of RAM would also be interesting - even if such systems are not "mainstream" today, in another 5 years, I think those will be pretty common.

[bob_c_b]

I simple test i did to prove it, I have a Dell Optiplex GX 260 with Pentium 4 2.00Ghz and 768MB ram. Under XP it runs fine, under vista boot time was around 5 minutes. Point proven.

All that proves is that the PC you installed on needs a newer BIOS, chipset driver or just isn't a good candidate for Vista. Honestly, the 2.0gHz P4 is from August of 2001, not shocking it doesn't run a new OS as fast as it ran XP SEVEN years ago.

Now if you ran XP on your Core 2 Duo and it was snappy, but Vista took 5 minutes to boot you might have a point.

[soldier1st]

vista is only slow if you got dog hardware but if vista has pretty new hardware it will perform better than xp,i like the fact that vista does not slow down afterawhile unlike xp which does.

[TEX4S]

MaximumPC just did an apples to apples comparison of XP and Vista...

overall XP SP3 was faster on 90% of the tests -- goto Maximum PC

I would have thought this was common sense - but apparently people are not as smart as I give them credit

Like mentioned above, more overhead = slower performance -- no way to get around that

If XP is "slower" at something than Vista -- there is another factor youre not considering - plain and simple

[CCRATA]

MaximumPC just did an apples to apples comparison of XP and Vista...

overall XP SP3 was faster on 90% of the tests -- goto Maximum PC

I would have thought this was common sense - but apparently people are not as smart as I give them credit

Like mentioned above, more overhead = slower performance -- no way to get around that

If XP is "slower" at something than Vista -- there is another factor youre not considering - plain and simple

Honestly I did a quick search and found no such comparison. I have tested XP SP3 and Vista SP1 on my laptop. Difference is negligible in all tests assuming you actually do apples to apples. Meaning you don't test Vista with all its services enabled. Added functionality ALWAYS comes at a price. Enable the same services as the ones you have in XP and Vista will perform the same. You can even enable most of the useful features and still see almost no performance difference. Remember unless the difference is >5% it is within the margin of error.

[waruikoohii]

With Vista drivers having matured to a point where their quality is comparable to their quality under XP, we see Vista performing (under apps such as games) pretty much the same as XP (give or take a frame here and there).

Proof: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp

Personally, I find Vista to be much snappier than XP was on the same hardware. It may not be "faster" but it responds much better to user input. This is because XP liked having free RAM, which was desirable back when RAM was expensive. Vista doesn't like having free RAM, because RAM is cheap.

[Skulltrail-old]

With Vista drivers having matured to a point where their quality is comparable to their quality under XP, we see Vista performing (under apps such as games) pretty much the same as XP (give or take a frame here and there).

Proof: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp

Personally, I find Vista to be much snappier than XP was on the same hardware. It may not be "faster" but it responds much better to user input. This is because XP liked having free RAM, which was desirable back when RAM was expensive. Vista doesn't like having free RAM, because RAM is cheap.

+1

[Berto]

It's as slow as a midget in molasses......if you don't have the right specs.

Just as before, from 98 to XP and 95 to 98.

[fix-this!]

people need to move on from xp, it won't be supported forever. vista is very fast & stable on the right pc or laptop.

[+Warwagon MVC]

One thing vista is defiantly faster with is the time from inserting a new removable device (like a thumbstick) to when its ready to be used.

Xp takes a 20 or so seconds, vista is almost blink!.

Vista is also a ram ###### in a good way. It loves ram. Given that Ram is 100x faster than your hard drive, why not store everything in ram if you aren't using it. I have Vista 64bit with 5 gigs of ram and once everything is up and running there is Zero slow downs. Every application is blink!. or as Steve jobs would say "And Boom!"

[fix-this!]

One thing vista is defiantly faster with is the time from inserting a new removable device (like a thumbstick) to when its ready to be used.

Xp takes a 20 or so seconds, vista is almost blink!.

Vista is also a ram ###### in a good way. It loves ram. Given that Ram is 100x faster than your hard drive, why not store everything in ram if you aren't using it. I have Vista 64bit with 5 gigs of ram and once everything is up and running there is Zero slow downs. Every application is blink!. or as Steve jobs would say "And Boom!"

agreed !!! im loving vista more and more now that sp1 is out. i look forward to sp2 & windows 7 too.

[naap51stang]

I find Vista just as fast, if not faster than XP, with comparable equipment. My apps load faster on Vista, thanks to the

tweak they did with prefetch. What's the use of having tons of ram, if you don't use it?

I can't remember when I've had a blue screen on Vista, or XP for that matter. Just as those "Mojave" commercials

show, Vista (at least now) is getting a bad rap. But I still say it is overpriced. :yes:

[roadgeek9]

For a while, I was what most here would call a "Vista Basher." Then I reinstalled it on my laptop after SP1 came out, I actually started to like it, and now I am using it on my main computer (which is my laptop).

[chrisj1968]

people need to move on from xp, it won't be supported forever. vista is very fast & stable on the right pc or laptop.

+100. I was a vista hater to the tenth power before SP1. It was slow and clunky. But then HP came out with a chipset drivers update and then SP1 was released at the same time that Vista IS worth the time now.

my only con to vista right now is, it takes up too much harddrive space. the kernel is like 15GB if memory serves me.