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Windows 8 beats XP in performance

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First post, by calvin

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On Core Duo (basically dual Pentium M) systems, 8.0 (not even 8.1U1!) exposes XP for the inefficient pig it is. Even if you don't like the UI, it's hard to deny that Microsoft has made significant performance, security, and stability improvements to the system. Watch here.

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Reply 1 of 93, by dr_st

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Well, with 3 generations of OSes between them, they better. But of course one can't take it for granted, given how most applications actually tend to get more bloated and slow with every new version, due to the "hardware gets faster so who cares" notion.

So, kudos to Microsoft here. 😀

Oh, and if you don't like the Windows 8 UI - installing Classic Shell takes care of most of the trouble, and you can pretty much have something that looks like Vista/Win7, with a few nice improvements.

https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/ - Random content on hardware, software, games and toys

Reply 2 of 93, by AidanExamineer

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Nice! I've been running Windows 10 preview for a while now, and trying everything I can think of on there (including games!). Was running super well on a C2D, and even better with a C2Quad.

Reply 3 of 93, by Skyscraper

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In this case its XP thats bloated with one quadrillion security patches, other bug fixes and added "features".

XP can be lightening fast but it demands some tinkering if your hardware isnt really high end. A XP SP3 system with almost all bloat running (system restore inactivated) did boot very fast with an I7 2600K@5.2 eventough the system disk was a normal 1Gb 7200RPM HDD. So fast in fact that you never had time to see any load screen, it seemed the system went from listing devices to the desktop more or less instantly 😁. On the other end of the spectrum we find these nice Netburst systems running fully updated XP SP3 with in best case 1GB memory... rebooting Windows is something you plan in advance.

If Windows 8 runs faster on these low end system thats just great but not really a good enough reason to upgrade any old relic unless Microsoft makes Windows 8 (or 10) totally free.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 4 of 93, by obobskivich

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Skyscraper wrote:

In this case its XP thats bloated with one quadrillion security patches, other bug fixes and added "features".

XP can be lightening fast but it demands some tinkering if your hardware isnt really high end. A XP SP3 system with almost all bloat running (system restore inactivated) did boot very fast with an I7 2600K@5.2 eventough the system disk was a normal 1Gb 7200RPM HDD. So fast in fact that you never had time to see any load screen, it seemed the system went from listing devices to the desktop more or less instantly 😁. On the other end of the spectrum we find these nice Netburst systems running fully updated XP SP3 with in best case 1GB memory... rebooting Windows is something you plan in advance.

Agreed on this. "Modern" Windows XP can get out of hand in terms of bloat, especially relative to "original" hardware for XP (computers from 2001-2002). Since Windows Vista, Microsoft has done a lot to improve that experience on more middle-of-the-road machines, and Windows 7 and 8 continued on that. IIRC similar articles to this were written for Windows 7 vs Vista, and Vista vs XP, all showing roughly consistent, or improved, performance as time went along. I think the biggest "gotcha" that most people come upon, and where the complaints about "increasing bloat" in newer versions of Windows may stem from, is opening up Task Manager and seeing "oh my gosh it's wasting so much RAM!" in Vista, 7, or 8. Most of that is the result of SuperFetch doing what it's supposed to do though, and that memory usage will scale (to an extent) as system memory size scales - it will also dump a lot of that stuff out of memory as applications require more memory. So seeing a Win7 box "idling on 1GB of RAM" is not uncommon at all, but that isn't a bad sign compared to Windows XP only showing 200MB in use. That extra memory actually being used should be helping with application load times, among other things.

Here's a fairly long article (that doesn't seem to have many graphs for its data - prepare to read 🤣 ) that compares Vista, XP, and 7:
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/ope … ta-vs-xp-615167
And another:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355703,00.asp
And another:
http://www.maximumpc.com/windows-7-review-xp- … chmarks/#page-4

If Windows 8 runs faster on these low end system thats just great but not really a good enough reason to upgrade any old relic unless Microsoft makes Windows 8 (or 10) totally free.

Microsoft has confirmed Windows 10 will be free for Windows 7/8 users. I don't know if this is a global program or not though.

Reply 5 of 93, by Rekrul

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obobskivich wrote:

Microsoft has confirmed Windows 10 will be free for Windows 7/8 users. I don't know if this is a global program or not though.

Of course it's going to be free, because the next step after Win10 is to move everyone to a subscription model where you will have to pay to keep receiving security updates.

Reply 6 of 93, by obobskivich

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Rekrul wrote:

Of course it's going to be free, because the next step after Win10 is to move everyone to a subscription model where you will have to pay to keep receiving security updates.

Source? Evidence?

Reply 8 of 93, by Lo Wang

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This is baloney of the highest order. A well groomed, finely tuned WinXP instalation you can't beat performance-wise.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 9 of 93, by Jorpho

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People keep referring ambiguously to "bloat" and "fine tuning", but hardly ever does someone point to something specific and say "there, that thing is enabled by default on XP/was installed in a security update but slows the system down".

Reply 10 of 93, by Lo Wang

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"NET Runtime Optimization service", that one alone is capable of making your computer unusable.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 11 of 93, by Skyscraper

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Jorpho wrote:

People keep referring ambiguously to "bloat" and "fine tuning", but hardly ever does someone point to something specific and say "there, that thing is enabled by default on XP/was installed in a security update but slows the system down".

Disable every single process you do not really need. XP can run well on really low spec hardware.

If your XP system is offline or behind some kind of decent router you can pretty much ditch all security stuff as long as you are aware of what type of things you should avoid doing.
The rest is a bit of trial and error.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 12 of 93, by dr_st

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smeezekitty wrote:

And if still sucks. I don't care if it's 50% faster. The ui is a disaster

As I said:

dr_st wrote:

Oh, and if you don't like the Windows 8 UI - installing Classic Shell takes care of most of the trouble, and you can pretty much have something that looks like Vista/Win7, with a few nice improvements.

Lo Wang wrote:

A well groomed, finely tuned WinXP instalation you can't beat performance-wise.

Probably Win2K will beat it. And DOS for sure. But performance is not all that matters. Functionality and usability as well. XP is old as heck, and there are many modern things it doesn't support. Heck, even Vista is getting long in the tooth (although that is mostly due to Microsoft's decision to bury it).

Of course for the things we typically discuss on Vogons, it doesn't matter. 😉

https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/ - Random content on hardware, software, games and toys

Reply 13 of 93, by Lo Wang

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To me WinXP is more of a "platform" in the sense that I don't use any of the applications that come bundled with it. I leave everything to third party software wherever possible, so the OS' just there to provide the file system, the api and the gui.

Functionality in a general sense, does absolutely noting for me if the system's bloated and unresponsive, and that's why I still cling unto XP; it gets the job done very efficiently, so no need for anything newer at the moment.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 14 of 93, by smeezekitty

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dr_st wrote:
As I said: […]
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smeezekitty wrote:

And if still sucks. I don't care if it's 50% faster. The ui is a disaster

As I said:

dr_st wrote:

Oh, and if you don't like the Windows 8 UI - installing Classic Shell takes care of most of the trouble, and you can pretty much have something that looks like Vista/Win7, with a few nice improvements.

Lo Wang wrote:

A well groomed, finely tuned WinXP instalation you can't beat performance-wise.

Probably Win2K will beat it. And DOS for sure. But performance is not all that matters. Functionality and usability as well. XP is old as heck, and there are many modern things it doesn't support. Heck, even Vista is getting long in the tooth (although that is mostly due to Microsoft's decision to bury it).

Of course for the things we typically discuss on Vogons, it doesn't matter. 😉

Shouldn't need a third party program to make it usable.

The context menus look like something designed for a monochrome display device.

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Windows 8 2013: http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx … 00_28FB4C25.png

WTH M$

Reply 15 of 93, by Jorpho

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Skyscraper wrote:
Disable every single process you do not really need. XP can run well on really low spec hardware. […]
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Jorpho wrote:

People keep referring ambiguously to "bloat" and "fine tuning", but hardly ever does someone point to something specific and say "there, that thing is enabled by default on XP/was installed in a security update but slows the system down".

Disable every single process you do not really need. XP can run well on really low spec hardware.

If your XP system is offline or behind some kind of decent router you can pretty much ditch all security stuff as long as you are aware of what type of things you should avoid doing.
The rest is a bit of trial and error.

You kind of demonstrated my point there. 😒

Lo Wang wrote:

"NET Runtime Optimization service", that one alone is capable of making your computer unusable.

Interesting... but reading up on it some more suggests that it (mscorsvw.exe) only runs when you update the .NET runtimes and then goes away forever on its own. It sure isn't running on my XP system at the moment, and I can't recall seeing it before. (Which doesn't mean it can't possibly appear; just that I haven't seen it before.)

Reply 16 of 93, by Lo Wang

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Not exactly. It will go away after it's done doing what it was programmed to do (waste your computer's resources), but it won't be gone forever. If you allow the service to be started after the update and the "optimizations" have finished, it will come back to haunt you when you least expect it.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 17 of 93, by obobskivich

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Jorpho wrote:

People keep referring ambiguously to "bloat" and "fine tuning", but hardly ever does someone point to something specific and say "there, that thing is enabled by default on XP/was installed in a security update but slows the system down".

"Security Center"/"Action Center" that SP2 adds can eat up resources and add start-up time. Windows Defender/Microsoft Anti-Virus can do the same. Newer .NET stuff can be a resource hog, as Lo Wang already pointed out (some stuff has dependencies on .NET though, so you can't just unilaterally eliminate it). Windows Firewall from SP2+ can also eat resources and cause some headaches (even on machines without an Internet connection, because some games will try to poll for an Internet connection, have Windows Firewall shut them down, and then everything crashes because the full-screen application lost focus 😵 ).

Lots of third-party applications and drivers from about 2003-on have "auto loaders" or "startup runtime" features that will eat up a lot of memory/resources too. For example a complete install of my SB Audigy 2 ZS from the CD without disabling any of the "run at startup" features will add another ~150MB of memory footprint. Newer drivers for graphics cards can eat up (relatively) a lot of disk space and introduce their own bloat. The same goes for stand-alone applications like Steam or Origin. Of course, none of this is generally a problem for a machine with 2-4GB of RAM, a modern multi-core processor, >500GB hard-drives, etc. But on a P3 with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard-drive (which is not really out of the question for Windows XP) it can really shackle the machine. Basically the point is, "XP era" can't be thought of as a single monolith in terms of system requirements and functionality - it can encompass everything from P2/P3 hardware being upgraded in 2001, to Core i7 hardware running it as recently as last year (well I'm sure there's some people who still refuse to upgrade as well).

Reply 18 of 93, by dr_st

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Lo Wang wrote:

Functionality in a general sense, does absolutely noting for me if the system's bloated and unresponsive

I'd say that to me it's pretty much the opposite. Who cares that it's "blazing fast" if it can't do things I need it to do? Besides, a lot of the myths about newer NT6-based Windows being "bloated and unresponsive" are just that: myths. They are not so bloated (whatever "groom and fine tuning" you can apply to XP, you can apply to Vista/7/8), and are quite responsive.

One simple example just from my use patterns: I tend to rely a lot on shortcut keys to launch applications on the desktop (assign a key combo to a shortcut and use that instead of double clicking on the icon). XP is the only damn system that goes through random periods where using any such combo stalls the system for 5-15 seconds, for no apparent reason. Talking about "unresponsive". It happens consistently, across multiple setups, and there is apparently no one in the entire world that knows why or how to resolve it. No such issues with any newer version of Windows.

smeezekitty wrote:

Shouldn't need a third party program to make it usable.

You know, I used to hold the same opinion about this. It's like I took personal offense at the fact that I would need to install something to bring back functionality that I previously had. Then I thought about it and said "Wait a minute, this is stupid". We use third party programs for lots and lots of things, all the time. Why should I be bothered so much by a small, efficient and yet rather useful shell extension?

https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/ - Random content on hardware, software, games and toys

Reply 19 of 93, by Lo Wang

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dr_st wrote:
Lo Wang wrote:

Functionality in a general sense, does absolutely noting for me if the system's bloated and unresponsive

I'd say that to me it's pretty much the opposite. Who cares that it's "blazing fast" if it can't do things I need it to do?

I don't think we're even talking the same scenario here: an OS that does everything but does it inefficiently, as in "Jack of all trades, master of none".

dr_st wrote:

Besides, a lot of the myths about newer NT6-based Windows being "bloated and unresponsive" are just that: myths. They are not so bloated (whatever "groom and fine tuning" you can apply to XP, you can apply to Vista/7/8), and are quite responsive.

Even if this thing you've said were true, and it's not (and I'd rather my teeth were knocked out with a crowbar than to suffer Vista to be installed on this computer), there's not one reason for me to bother with any MS OS newer than XP/2003 because of the countless, recalcitrant privacy and security issues as well as the loss of backwards compatibility.

dr_st wrote:

One simple example just from my use patterns: I tend to rely a lot on shortcut keys to launch applications on the desktop (assign a key combo to a shortcut and use that instead of double clicking on the icon). XP is the only damn system that goes through random periods where using any such combo stalls the system for 5-15 seconds, for no apparent reason. Talking about "unresponsive". It happens consistently, across multiple setups, and there is apparently no one in the entire world that knows why or how to resolve it. No such issues with any newer version of Windows

I have not personally experienced that myself. Then again, my WinXP installation isn't standard by any stretch of the imagination, so I might have inadvertently resolved this by tweaking something else, assuming the problem was already there to begin with.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9