Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Becn — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:09:07 GMT

What about dos?

I've got a floppy disk here that will totally own you're silly graphical stuff when it comes to boot times

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Steven Dorfmeister — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:51:38 GMT

I think you are looking at it backwards. You should be after the slowest boot times (with the OS connected to "the enterprise"). :)

I think I will win. Today was about a 5 minute boot to see my XP SP2 desktop, then probably another 2 minutes before everything calms down so I can go into Outlook. Yes that is on my whopper Dell D810 3 year old machine.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Keith Combs — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:54:54 GMT

Good point Steve, and I neglected to mention none of the machines are domain joined and require a directory server and authentication method of any kind.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Brandon — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:12:09 GMT

Windows Boot times in the enterprise environment is quite slow. The go to lunch and come back to a slow computer syndrome is also annoying.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Keith Combs — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:27:34 GMT

Brandon, like I said, "properly installed and configured" and for this series of tests, I kept authentication and directory services out of the picture. Most of the college students buying and using a Mac or Windows machine won't see a domain until after college so the point it really moot to them.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Brandon — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:38:39 GMT

I personally hate my Dell Inspiron 1520. I think dell really screwed this machine up. It does not resume and go to sleep consistantly, the paint is wearing off, the lid creaks, I had to get a replacement a week after owning it...

Waking from sleep is very important to me, being a college student, I usually put my laptop to sleep change classes pull it out and resume note taking or work. But with this Dell, sometimes when I open my bookbag it is super hot in there because the machine never slept! I hate to shutdown completely because it does take a while to boot, plus I have to open up OneNote, Outlook, Windows Live Mail...etc.

I want to buy a Mac for this reason, so I can reliably sleep and wake, along with fast boot times. I just have to see if anyone wants to buy this piece of crap notebook from Dell.

I really feel done with Windows Machines. I liked IBM, my father had one but then the titainium hinge broke on it, and the motherboard died. Those laptops were so sturdy feeling, really like a tank, I just do not understand how it just broke. This was the T42 btw.

I'm glad you are exploring this...

College students do care about this, I do. I want to see some reliability tests done, just because. I wonder if it is Vista that causes my inconsistancies, or if it is Dell. I suspect Dell.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Jordan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:58:03 GMT

If it takes a long time to load into a domain environment, i dare say its set up wrong.

I had that issue once and come to find out, i had the DNS address typed in wrong so once i fixed that 5 minute logons went to a couple seconds.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Keith Combs — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:42:33 GMT

Brandon,

There are a ton of laptops on the market. I have two Dell laptops. I have the Inspiron 6000 and the Latitude D820. Both are designed for Windows XP and run it pretty well. Neither run Windows Vista very well. My wife and daughter use them.

I also have two Lenovo ThinkPad T61p's. They run Windows Vista very well, and also suspend/resume quickly and efficiently. I rarely use suspend/resume because I am always pulling the primary drive and popping in my Windows Server 2008 or SUSE 10 drives. I plan to do some suspend resume tests over the next week or so to see if I spot any issues. Power management in the ThinkPad line is pretty good. I can't attest to any other machines from the other Windows OEM's.

I always wonder during these discussions how a consumer (or potential customer) of a particular laptop and OS is supposed to know if the darn thing really works. Most of the OEM's don't give you much time to use a device before the return policy expires. And there doesn't seem to be a good way to read quality reviews of long term use on the popular laptops.

From a student point of view, get a small fast machine that runs cool, has good battery life, and has decent power. Small and light is good in a backpack. Don't get a 17" boat anchor. The MacBook and MacBook Pro are small and light, but my Pro runs too hot. I don't like that. My T61p runs much cooler but it's 2 pounds heavier. But it screams, is rock solid, and runs Windows Vista very well.

If you are interested in another Dell, the XPS 1330 has received a lot of good reviews. That would probably be a solid choice.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Brandon — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:30:48 GMT

I wish there was a try a laptop out thing on campus...

I need a pretty hefty notebook, which is why I got the inspiron 1520. It had the Nvidia 8600M GT and the santa rosa chipset. I run a lot of engineering apps, particularly those from Autodesk, like Inventor 2008...etc.

My friend has the Dell m1330, it is nice and all but the 8400M kinda makes me weary. Plus her plastic has warped a little bit, and that just bothers me.

I think I should have tried IBM again. But I do not know what their video card options are, it just has to be midrange. The only problem now is a laptop is such a huge investment. Buying another one less than a year later is just fiscally unsound. The way things are going I think I am going to be stuck with a laptop I hate for years to come.

My deepest desire is for Dell to go bankrupt. I am fed up with this crap. Just now when I opened my laptop, I got a bluescreen (not the typical kind) that said:

"*** Hardware Malfunction

Call your hardware vendor for support

NMI: Parity check/memory parity error

***The system has halted***"

I'm so ticked right now. I was doing a titration curve, to which I can't get an equation for to find the second derivitive to find the inflection point :(. If anyone can help I have a post about it

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=631630&st=0&gopid=589336550&#entry589336550

Anyways I'm ticked, I am going to contact dell today, they probably will do nothing, I will be switched between agents and nothing will happen. I used to love computers, but I hate them more and more, they cause headaches, people come to me to fix their problems, I have my own problems, I can't get stuff that works...

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Jonathan Giles — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:59:09 GMT

I have to disagree with your position that a 25% runtime difference on the copy test is significant (test wise) but insignificant (real life wise). In SMBs you often need to handle projects in a hands-on fashion, 50 machines x 1 beer. Can you say "worked the weekend"?

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Keith Combs — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:17:39 GMT

Jonathan,

I am not discounting that your time is valuable. However, it the difference enough to warrant a platform switch or not?

Put another way, in my most recent tests, the T61p with Windows Vista was three times faster than the MacBook Pro at suspending and nearly as fast at resume. Three times faster sounds great, but the devil is in the details. Should someone worry about 30 seconds?

Certainly there's a line in the sand we all need to draw on time. If something is irritating enough, then by all means switch to something that is more productive. I do. If Windows Vista didn't meet my needs, I'd run Windows XP or something else. If Windows Server 2008 ran Sony Vegas, I'd be using it.

Trust me, I do these sorts of tests for several reasons. If Vista ends up being last place, so be it. The Windows team will get the feedback and have to address it. I think they are pretty focused on improving the performance and we are no where near done.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Kabo B. Ness — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:10:19 GMT

I'm interested as to why you didn't install Windows on the Macbook Pro such that you'd have identical hardware for your tests. I'm interested to see what you find when XP SP3 comes out.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Keith Combs — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:22:34 GMT

Good question Kabo. I'll answer both.

Regarding running Windows on a Mac, I have not setup bootcamp for a reason. If I want Windows on my Mac, I use VMWare Fusion. It's a better fit for my needs. That allows me to run all the operating systems I run in a more contained fashion via virtualization. Frankly I didn't think people would be that interested in how Vista performs on Bootcamp. I thought a more direct comparison between OS X and Vista woudl be more interesting to the readers of my blog.

Regarding XP SP3, it just became available so I wanted to wait for that. Unfortunately timing is bad for me. I am headed to MMS 2008 and will be unable to get to it for another 10 days or so. I'll probably run a couple of tests. XP SP3 on my T61p and on a five year old Compaq Evo n620c.

No promises though because I expect TechED 2008 to get in my way immediately after MMS 2008 so I will have to wait and see what happens.

Cheers,

Keith

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

deftone — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:46:38 GMT

With my Asus eee PC @ 900Mhz running a tweaked out version of XP SP3 I can be on the internet within 31 seconds. I wanna see a Mac running OSX touch that. If it can't, XP wins due to the fact it can be tweaked to boot much quicker.

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

Keith Combs — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:52:06 GMT

31 seconds is pretty freaking fast. New winner. :)

re: Who's the fastest OS in the land? WinXP vs Vista vs OS X

deftone — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:57:26 GMT

Boot time is probably the only category my EEE PC would win and that is mostly due to utilizing a Solid State drive which has a 0.5ms Access Time as opposed to >10ms for the average notebook drive.

Also my XP SP3 is severely stripped down (Windows folder = 457MB and shrinking) but it's still entirely 100% functional (I have added a touchscreen, bluetooth, gps, and additional internal storage and external TV tuner).

XP deserves a little credit for being so flexible/customizable if you know what you are doing.