I saw the article at ZDNet (Windows XP outshines Vista in benchmarking test - ZDNet UK) and at various other places and decided to comment. It compares a 1GB XP machine and a 1GB Vista machine and says that Vista is slower - both using beta service packs. This article links back to the blog of a certain benchmarking company (http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-xp-sp3-yields-performance-gains.html) and the result was an article with quotes in it like:
"Vista, both with and without SP1, performed over two times slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.
Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than two percent compared to performance without SP1 — much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent."
Now this annoyed me twice. So did they turn off things like the pre-loading of applications, was this a fresh PC or one where the inbuilt tools could optimise themselves? Did they turn off new features like and anti-spyware and search engine, the graphics etc? You can't add a bundle of new features and get it all for free - they have to load and boot up time is the most likely time.
"The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials."
Now this also annoyed me, even more. a Vista machine with the recommended MINIMUM amount of RAM, but XP with eight times it's minimum recommended. Microsoft clearly recognised that Vista's new features require more memory, as do Office, so they have one machine that is 5 years skinny on features and another that has 5 years worth of extra features and security built in. Come on. What about trying it on a 2GB machine, or one that the tests have been run on a hundred times so the optimisation engines in Vista can get to work. I've done benchmarking as a job and these runs plain stink of "wanting to get a press release out there and talking about us" rather than any real facts.
While a Microsoft spokesperson did not comment on the memory issue, the new features or anything else, they did comment on the fact that both service packs are not finished, so conclusions drawn now are a bit early!!
"In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that, although the company understood the interest in the service packs, they are "still in development" and will continue to evolve before their release. "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs," the spokesperson said."
Right, had to get that off my chest, now, back to the day job.
ttfn
David
Posted
Wed, Nov 28 2007 1:01 AM
by
David Overton