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

Computer Management > Services >

Is "Windows Search" running on auto?

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.

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)

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.