Re: Speed comparison; WinXP and WinME






In the real world, all of the slowest PC's I've run
across during during the past couple of years
have been WinXP's -- mouse-slamming, go-take-
a bathroom-break, check-phone-messages, read-
the-newspaper slow. To be fair, those were PC's
with bad cases of WinRot, but I've never seen
performance degrade so badly on the other
Windows versions. With Windows 98, you could
clear out the Temp folder and the browser caches,.
search for and delete misc "tmp" files, empty the
Recyle Bin, and then run Defrag to gain back
some good performance, but with XP, nothing
seems to work nearly as well, aside from a
full reformat/re-install (which a lot of tech-savvy
users do regularly: http://tinyurl.com/ryttb)

But again you only need to look at the size of the
OS to note that this is what you should expect.
Microsoft has tried to compensate with XP's bloat
by all sorts of tweaks, and XP does indeed seem
reasonably quick if you freshly install the retail
box version from scratch on a new PC with a
wiped hard drive, but then load up all your apps,
and give it just a few months, and you're back to
slowpokiness.

Very recently I had the interesting experience of
working on this Dell gaming notebook PC,
http://tinyurl.com/kj5rq, and fixing up a somewhat
battered Sony PCG-Z505HE notebook for a friend.
The Sony had a bad hard drive so my friend wasn't
so sure it was worth fixing, but I replaced the drive
it with a Toshiba 40Gb (not so easy -- the Sony had
to be disassembled) and while I was at it I upgraded
the memory with a spare memory module I had
lying around. I put on a clean version of Windows
2000 and although he had Office XP on the old
hard drive, I put on Office 2K because I had it handy.
I also installed Firefox, Irfanview, F-Prot for anti-virus
and both Ad-Aware and Spybot for anti-spyware,
as well as a couple of other choice freeware
goodies.

Now bear in mind that the Sony had a 450 MHz
P3 and 192Mb and the Dell a 2GHz dual-core
P4 and 2 Gb of memory. So in terms of turning
them on and just doing stuff like getting online
and opening up and closing out programs, which
do you think was faster? With the Dell plugged
into an outlet and running at full speed, both
were about as responsive. With the Dell on
battery only and auto-running at a slower speed,
the Sony was noticeably faster. To be fair, though,
this wasn't apples to apples -- the Dell still had
all of its preloaded crap demo software like McAfee
and AOL running, while the Sony had only the
basic apps needed. I actually ended up cleaning
up the Dell a bit -- you can't have a new $3K
"gaming" notebook being shown up by a tired
old P3 notebook with a bad battery. Also I didn't
try running Quake 4 or such to see the Dell's
true (alleged) gaming capabilities.

The results, though, were pretty much in line with
what I've seen elsewhere. All the increasing
horsepower is being absorbed by increasingly
bloated software, and not just by Microsoft. And
having better batteries is being offset by having
to fuel all that horsepower, so the practical battery
life for notebooks has essentially remained
constant on average for the past 6 yrs or so,
roughly about 2hrs for the mainstream notebooks
after the short initial "break-in" period. (And this
apparently is not exactly going to improve with
Vista: http://tinyurl.com/qostm)

FYI.


Thanks for this very interesting thesis, BC.
It seems, therefore, that the claims (many of which can be seen in the
articles in Cary's post) about self-optimizaton of WinXP and it being
the best-performing Windows OS ever are somewhat divergent from the
real-world truth.
Paul


-BC

.

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