thanks for this test and review. really helped me in a moment of thoughts about which OS to go with!

One only can conclude that given a certain hardware one or the other is best. But we do not have the same hardware, or do we? And what about all other variables in the play

- For instance I suspect that for XP the drivers are somewhat outdated because not maintained or available any more for this hardware
- XP has to run with one leg off, because of only using 3 GB max
- Is disk layout optimum/the same in all three cases
- And caching, swap space
- And level of tuning (hours spent on). I think Vista an Seven have a lot of built in hours spent on. Hours gained by the experiences in XP. But maybe with some effort XP can get in front even more
-  etc

Taken all into account one could conclude: “Well this makes XP all the better my favorite choice”. But than again what  are you not getting in terms of:
- security
- stability
- resource utilization
- ergonomics
- pleasure to use
Not to mention the fact that you should run Adobe reader v9 instead of v10 because XP is not capable of running it. Or should I say Adobe reader v10 is not capable to run on XP. You should be astound how difficult is to get a tire for a 1910 Ford. 

In other words these kind of tests most commonly have a religious believe as an outcome. Hardly worth the time spend on such a test. Only one thing counts: “Am I happy with the compilation of hard and software I have got”

I remember from my time as a Cobol programmer (about 1986) that my company ordered a test in efficiency of certain Cobol instructions. The outcome was to circumvent the use of for instance the “Inspect” statement (Happy)  and write it down in a series of loops (NOT Happy). My immediately reaction was: “And what about the easy of use, and the readability”. Not aware of the fact that the Cobol-compiler of the year after also would deal with the shortcomings of this illustrious “Inspect” stament.  I think I can remember IBM changed the compiled result to an inline function instead of a far call. So, a total worthless investigation. However, a good side effect of the investigation was the start of a fully automated process for Cobol programs to test whether they complied to all other company rules.  Resulting in a boost of quality and uniformness. In terms of Johan Cruyff: “Elk nadeel heb zijn voordeel” (All negative things has his positive side). “has his…” deliberately because Johan makes these kind of errors.

With Kind Regards,
Eric-Jan Hoogendijk,
The Netherlands.

Currently, this test is comparing Apples to Oranges.

Let’s see this XP Home (starters) 32-bit vs.  Vista Starters (Home)  32-bit vs Windows 7 32-bit (Home / Starters) and then let’s see how everything fares.  Then compare the 32 bit vs. 64 bit of the same operating systems in all the tests.  After that show what is the fastest of the bunch and where.

By the way, for those of you doing virtualization in hardware, it’s not technically worth it unless you have 8 cores or more, 16 GB of RAM or more and have a descent 64-bit operating system, in the case of Windows.  I would suggest Windows Server 2003 64-bit edition, the Win 2k3 is the big brother of the XP 64-bit Pro edition.  As the Windows Server 2003 32-bit edition is the big brother of the XP 32-bit edition.  It’s quite a bit better in virtualization than Server 2008, unless you need to do cloud computing EC2 stuff, then the Server 2008 and soon to be Windows 8 Server (Server 2012) would be your best choice.

If you are virtualizing software in a host operating system and are doing device driver creation, the best thing to do is get a system with 16 GB of RAM or more and have a virtualization system and software than can handle more memory to help speed up the Virtual Machine emulation.  Virtualization in it’s very nature is never in real time no matter how many cores you give the VM and how fast the cores are.

As I said before, Windows XP 64-bit only went to SP2, on the other hand XP 32-bit series has gone to SP3 as of current. The only NT series that went to that great length and can still a good number of general programs is Windows 2000 Professional, they went to SP4.

To address the worst Microsoft system ever?  On the Microsoft Windows side, I would have to say, Millenium Edition aka Windows ME, that’s got to be the worst, then Windows Vista.  On the other side
of Microsoft’s work, I would have to say OS/2 before IBM bought it from them and worked their magic so to speak, that was one horrendous OS when MS had created it (but that’s just my take on things).

Why M$
didn`t issue Win XP 64 sp4 with full sata, ivy & sandy bridge support ?

The answer
is simple – $$$. They stopped getting revenue from the governments/military and
big corporations as from the home users, because they already had bought XP. And
supporting it only eats money. So M$ had only 1 choise – to let XP break (with
help of the incompatible new hardware from intel) (HW could be made to start in
compatible mode, then switched to hi-perf. by a driver if any) so they did it.

Now the
gov/military/etc need to buy win7/win8 for their new hardware.  (OR switch to linux which is heretical thought
for the most of them).