Windows XP Significantly Outperforms Vista, Tests Show
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/sho...cleID=204203975

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The researchers compared patched and unpatched versions of Vista and XP running Microsoft Office on a dual-core Dell notebook. The results revealed the time taken to complete Office productivity tasks such as the creation of a compound document and presentation materials.

Devil Mountain researchers ran a mix of tests comparing existing versions of the operating systems -- the original Vista and XP SP2 -- and versions that had been patched with the latest updates -- Vista SP1 beta and XP SP3 beta. Tests were also run on machines with 1 Gbyte and 2 Gbytes of memory.

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests -- regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer. In fact, XP proved to be roughly twice as fast as Vista in most of the tests.

For instance, notebooks running Vista SP1 took more than 80 seconds to complete a series of Office tasks in the OfficeBench test suite, while notebooks running Windows XP SP2 completed the tasks in just over 40 seconds.