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).