My Speed Tests: XP SP2 -vs- Win7 Ultimate 32bit

[pparks1]

Ok, to set the stage...I've been chatting with users who maintain that Windows 7 (just like Vista) is a bloated resource hog of an OS which needs to have numerous services disabled to attain performance levels equivalent to Windows XP SP2. The crux of the argument is typically on how Prefetch works and the caching of applications to RAM, thus not leaving large amounts of RAM free for the system and in generally just chewing up resources which are better left alone.

For this test, I performed the same steps on the same hardware. (In fact, I used the same exact machine). Here are the specs
* Asus P5QL Pro mobo
* Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00Ghz
* 4GB Corsair DDR2-800 RAM
* 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive
* Samsung 22X DVD Burner
* EVGA Nvidia 8600GT 256MB video cards
* Intel 10/100/1000 NIC's

In each instance, the machine was using the defaults as they come out of the box. Meaning that things like UAC, System Restore Points, Indexing, PreFetch and the like all remained on.

Test 1: Install the Operating Systems. This was from the first push of the power button until I had a desktop with no hourglass
Windows XP SP2: 19:19
Windows 7 Ultimate: 14:12

Test 2: Amount of time installing drivers after OS was up to eliminate all exclamation points in Device Manager
Windows XP SP2: 9:27 (video, chipset, 2 lan drivers, audio, ATK)
Windows 7 Ultimate: :41 (ATK driver from Windows Update)

Note: Not included was approx 35 minutes time downloading and identifying what XP needed. (sorry, had to put that in there, but it's true)

Test 3: Full typical installation of Office 2007 Professional Plus from CD.
Windows XP SP2: 4:29
Windows 7 Ultimate: 4:40

Test 4: Time to Open Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word and Access
Windows XP SP2: 20 seconds
Windows 7 Ultimate: 17 seconds

Test 5: Compare install sizes of OS at the present point
Windows XP XP2: 7,113,970,880
Windows 7 Ultimate: 13,895.876,672

Test 6: Install from USB Key (CDburnerXP, FileZilla, Firefox 3.5.2, MediaMonkey 3.0.6, Paint.Net, OpenOffice 3.0.1 and 7zip)
Windows XP SP2: 3:58
Windows 7 Ultimate: 3:06

Test 7: Open OpenOffice writer, Calc, Impress and Base (and create a new DB to get to a ready window)
Windows XP SP2: 18 seconds
Windows 7 Ultimate: 19 seconds

Test 8: Restart computer, get back to desktop, shutdown and wait for machine to power off
Windows XP SP2: 1:17
Windows 7 Ultimate: 1:19

Test 9: Take 3.7GB of CentOS Linux install files on desktop and compress with 7Zip using Normal Compression
Windows XP SP2: 15:23
Windows 7 Ultimate: 15:36


Most notable observations:

• Complaints about slow speed of OpenOffice seem unjustified, speed differences could be my click speed. Open speeds are right in line with MS Office.
• Install size of Windows 7 is larger...but it's also got restore points and so forth which I didn't clear. (forgot to check right after install)
• Speed difference of MS Office install could be spin-up time of drive.
• Remember in Test 6...that I had 7 prompts for UAC that I had to click through and Windows 7 was still faster.

So, overall, to me it seems that Windows 7 in it's default state is a very quick and robust OS. It has all the drivers pretty much baked in, has advanced searching and indexing, has a much nicer interface than Windows XP, has been security with UAC....and still manages to pretty much be either faster or within a few seconds of Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with every test that I threw at it with all services like PreFetch up and running.

 

[Sassa]

We have a winner!!!

 

[stormy13]

And just for fun here is a 7 vs Vista gaming comparison,

Windows 7 vs Vista VGA game performance

 

[Antman]

We have a winner!!!

aand hhis nname iis pparks1.

Such an effort is truly appreciated and worthy of peer commendation - especially since the genesis was dictated in response to relentlessly unfounded and disingenuous commentary.

+1

 

[spazzie]

aand hhis nname iis pparks1.

Such an effort is truly appreciated and worthy of peer commendation - especially since the genesis was dictated in response to relentlessly unfounded and disingenuous commentary.

+1

One person's testing doesn't count for everyone's - otherwise Vista would have been a huge 'hit' worldwide which simply wasn't the case.

I'll rebuild my DELL 4600 3.0Ghz HT, 3.3Gb RAM, GeForce 6200 GPU, SATA 7200RPM disk ..first with Windows XP+SP3 then kick off the Windows 7 install so we get dual boot.

I also appreciate pparks1 testing and will post up my own results based on his/her tests (perhaps everyone should be encouraged to do so?)

Thanks for the awesome website!

 

[pparks1]

One person's testing doesn't count for everyone's - otherwise Vista would have been a huge 'hit' worldwide which simply wasn't the case.

To be fair, I wasn't testing Vista. And had I tested Vista upon release compared to XP...I would have expected to see my tests favoring XP. I wasn't a fan of Vista on release. And it's also the reason that I did numerous tests and provided information on what each step entailed. This way people could either duplicate or criticize my methods.

I'll rebuild my DELL 4600 3.0Ghz HT, 3.3Gb RAM, GeForce 6200 GPU, SATA 7200RPM disk ..first with Windows XP+SP3 then kick off the Windows 7 install so we get dual boot.

I also appreciate pparks1 testing and will post up my own results based on his/her tests (perhaps everyone should be encouraged to do so?)

Thanks for taking the time to set up the test environment and going through the motions. I know it's time consuming...but lots of positives could come out of it. Who knows, you might even discover some problems in your configuration/drivers/etc that you never knew were there. I know that has happened before to me.

 

[Antman]

...I'll rebuild my DELL 4600 3.0Ghz HT, 3.3Gb RAM, GeForce 6200 GPU, SATA 7200RPM disk ..first with Windows XP+SP3 then kick off the Windows 7 install so we get dual boot...Thanks for the awesome website!

It will be interesting to see how Win7 works on an older system like that.

 

[Tews]

meh ... it barely runs on my ancient rig...

 

[zigzag3143]

It will be interesting to see how Win7 works on an older system like that.

I have a dell 8300 like that. P-IV 3.0, 512 ram, ati 9600, 5400HD, and im running win 7 Ultimate on it with surprising ease. Its my backup server.

Ken

 

[gingem]

I have a new system, Asus P7P55D motherboard, Intel I7 860 Quad Core, 8GB DDR, WD 1TB STAT2.0 Drive w/16mb cache, Asus X480 video, and Win7 Ultimate. I have only loaded a few programs so far and when I do a search on the hard drive it seems to take forever. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[neo101]

Computer Management > Services >

Is "Windows Search" running on auto?

 

[gingem]

I really don't know, I will check to see if it is on auto. What is the difference?

 

[chrysalis]

For me I measure performance in response time and how fast my everyday apps are. I take that higher than benchmarks.

My conclusion is.

1 - for bootup windows 7 is faster, on just about all my systems except in specific cases such as driver problems.
2 - for networking such as web browsing and downloading on default settings windows 7 is usually snappier and faster than windows XP, this is expected as XP is over 10 years old and by default optimised for dialup.
3 - for gaming mixed experiences, using my freezesms master system emulator there is some strange sound issues and lag when saving states not spent a lot of time diagnosing yet but the issue is there. On fable TLC a old XP game the game runs well enough no noticeble lag, same with warcraft3 another XP game. I have no very new pc games such as crysis. The weak point is probably creative cards, creative suffered badly with vista and win7 for whatever reason they got caught asleep. There is onboard sound tho if creative hw is problematic or even other decent sound cards out there less known and more expensive than creative but are very good in windows seven.
4 - 2d desktop performance, with aero off aka XP mode its way laggier, lots of 2d hw acceleration removed in vista and windows 7 although I understand 'some' 2d acceleration was readded in win7 over vista. This problem shows with desktop apps that do not fully implement aero acceleration features such as mirc, with such apps it helps to use wddm 1.0 drivers as wddm 1.1 seems to lose around 30% on 2d performance. With aero on and with apps that fully utilise it things feel much snappier than XP. Occasionally on my old system before I upgraded to i5 I would get weird jerky scrolling issues that I could fix simply by restarting aero. Not noticed yet on my i5 tho, the cpu may now be powerful enough to hide it or the problem is gone after my reinstall.
5 - multimedia such as dvd's, xvid, mp3 etc. For the most part seems fine in terms of performance in fact I would say both dvd and xvid are improved, mp3 no slower or faster but on my creative card there is a loss of some features that I used to use to enhance mp3 experience however thats not a performance issue.
6 - general responsiveness such as loading an IE window or firefox in my opinion is better than XP. This can mainly be put down to the better caching in 64bit as caching on 32bit is really hindered and capped and my win7 is 64bit. Some may say this is an unfair comparison but its worth noting that XP 64bit is a poor port of the XP 32bit so thats a downside of XP and as a result it loses out.

The issues come in my opinion if you have a machine with low ram. If you have 1 gig or less superfetch is probably best turned off, under half gig defenitly turn it off and even with it off you will notice more hdd activity than perhaps with XP as XP has less ram overhead. eg. my laptop with 1 gig of ram in win7 was not that great. I put a 2 gig stick in to make it 3 gig and now its a new lease of life.
Also the windows search service hog the system down and in my opinion are best disabled, XP had a similiar problem with its indexing service.

overall tho I reckon win7 is better because of improved caching algrotihms and better networking, UAC isnt really a performance hit in my view. Vista is slower than win7 for defenite for a very similiar feature set.

 

[neo101]

If you look at my specs Socket A + Barton 3000@400mhz
(can't get 3GB ram working with Ati card/Win 7 - works perfect on XP)

I easily run 'Crysis' on Direct X 10
4x Anti Alaising + 'Medium' game settings (only phys-x on low due to CPU overheads)

 

[windows7theme]

I have personally always felt Windows 7 Home Premium which I use a lot faster than Windows XP Professional SP 2. I am not an active gamer and so I dont know about that part. But in all other comparisons I find Windows 7 a whole lot faster than Windows XP SP2 and I have been telling that ever since I used Windows 7. I have also wrote a few articles about in a few article websites.