Vista Vexes

by Jan Fagerholm

May 2007

Windows Vista is Microsoft’s next-gen operating system. But does it provide next-gen performance? After weeks of use, I finally decided to benchmark Vista against Windows XP.

Methodology is important in comparisons like this, so I decided to run the benchmarks on a system where I have Windows Vista and Windows XP installed on a dual boot setup. This way, the hardware is the same for both operating systems.

The system consisted of an ASUS M2 motherboard with an AMD Athlon X2 4200+ dual core CPU and 1 GB of memory. Other particulars include an ATI Radeon X600 PCI-X graphics card and a single 300 GB SATA-2 hard drive.

The software used was PageMark Software’s PerformanceTest; it can be downloaded and used free for 30 days. I like to use benchmarks for burning in new machines; the tests can take several hours, and they use the system’s components exhaustively.

Overall, the PageMark rating for Vista was 391.3, against XP’s 468.3 (higher numbers are better). This is a 19.7% negative hit for running Vista versus running XP. Windows XP bests Vista on 18 out of the 24 tests in PageMark’s suite. Where’s the performance going?

First, Vista matches XP in performance in several important areas, but “matches” is the operative description. Vista keeps up in CPU string sort operations (used for indexing), 2D graphics shapes (think pie charts and the like) memory writes, and hard disk seeks.

The bad news is really bad. Of the 18 tests in which XP beats Vista, 7 of the differences are vast. In 2D graphics, Vista is slower by 58% to 81%. In fonts tests, Vista is 50% slower. Sequential disk reads are 51% slower in Vista; disk writes are 54% slower.

Hey, I’m not talking about 3D games. All the performance items I’m picking out here are the ones used by office suites, Web browsers and e-mail. One of the trade journals I read tested Vista against XP and concluded, “unless it’s imperative that users have an OS with a more exciting look and feel, XP will offer better performance than Vista.”

Performance tweaking will be a topic of interest for months to come in Vista. To find out where resources are going, go to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx and grab the Sysinternals utilities. Microsoft has acquired Sysinternals from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell and made their utilities available for download. Some are pretty techie, but I point to Process Explorer as particularly useful. (See Fig. 1) The utility runs on both Vista and XP.

Process Explorer gives you information in Windows that rivals Linux utilities. It tells you what program is using a process and much more information in real time. There is a good deal of granularity available in the display. As with any good utility, it is capable of displaying more than you need.

BTW, on the Sysinternals home page, look at the menus on the left and find the item for “Utilities Index.” Follow that link and you will find a place to download the entire Sysinternals suite in a single .ZIP file. Unzip it into an empty directory. There is no need to install anything; just double-click and run.

‘Nuff for now.