In a recent commercial from Apple Macintosh, they poked fun at their "Windows guy" character who reluctantly confessed to downgrading back to Windows XP and undoing his Windows Vista upgrade. Even though this delivers some laughs, the fact of the matter is that in real-world testing by independent labs, XP was shown to consistently perform better than the newer Vista operating system.
Interestingly, these surprising results that came from comparing the performance of XP against the "latest and greatest" Windows Vista were consistent regardless of which versions of the operating systems were used or the amount of RAM memory that was installed on the computer. The tests clearly showed that even when the Vista installation was upgraded to the most recent "Service Pack Beta One" package, Vista still consistently proved to be sluggish.
In order to run comprehensive tests, the researchers installed both patched and unpatched versions of the two systems, namely Windows XP and Vista. They were run on a Dell laptop with a dual-core processor and they used the Microsoft Office application with each version of these operating systems.
The test results and local search showed the time it took for each of the system configurations to complete a number of given tasks in Office. These tasks included creating a complex document and creating a series of presentation slides. The times to complete these tasks under XP and under Vista were then carefully noted and compared against each other.
The results were not at all what the researchers were expecting to report. Not only were all of the tested functions faster with the XP operating system installed, but the testers were surprised to find that XP proved to be approximately twice as fast as the operations performed in Vista, in almost all of the tests.
This is a significant difference in speed and undoubtedly is a difference that will be noticeable to even casual computer users. For power users, such a drastic reduction in speed is not only frustrating but simply unacceptable. Because of this, many people who had "upgraded" to Vista have subsequently gone back and reinstalled XP on their machines.
It is no wonder that the folks at Apple grabbed the opportunity to poke fun at the latest "upgrade" offered to Microsoft Windows users.
On top of the bad news that came out of those speed comparisons of XP versus Vista, the other testing delivered some additional blows. The experiments with the two operating systems also clearly showed that Vista demonstrated a tendency to be "resource-hungry" and gobbled up virtually all of the extra RAM memory that might be added to a computer. When testers doubled the memory in the test machine from one gigabyte to two gigabytes, the result was a measly 4% improvement in performance.
Not only is Vista vexed with these performance problems, but at this time there are very few new applications that have been re-written for the Vista version, providing very little motivation for people to spend the money on this upgrade. Taken together, it is no wonder that people are choosing to stick with their Windows XP system until there are more compelling reasons to make the switch.
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