My point is that if one goes to apply tweaks to minimize footprint / increase responsiveness and what not, one will find that there are tweaks to apply to NT6 OSes as well, and that at the end, the result will be very similar.

Vista was the worst among those OSes in terms of responsiveness, simply because Microsoft did not bother fine-tuning it. After the backlash, they made a good deal of improvements, some in Vista itself, many more in 7/8/8.1. Vista itself is already good enough for a semi-modern PC, although probably will lose to XP in head-to-head on older hardware. With Win7 and later you will not notice differences in responsiveness of normal tasks, on similarly configured setups. I can attest to that, at least on this Pentium M laptop I have with Win7 and WinXP installed in dual-boot.

Now, even if in the end, you will achieve even 20% increase in responsiveness after countless tweaks, which will probably translate to a few seconds per day, is this really worth all the time invested into messing with it in the first place? Not to mention using an almost 15-year old operating system, without many nice UI enhancements put in starting from Win7 (Vista actually didn't have many of these), and which is already starting to hit the wall in terms of software forward-compatibility (in the sense that modern software already can't or won't run on XP)?

Out of curiosity - what are these "countless privacy and security issues" you are talking about, that bother you so much with NT6-based Windows?

And again, out of curiosity - how much time did you really spend with Vista/7/8 before condemning them so? Did you try to tweak them the way you tweak your XP?

I used to be of similar opinion - XP is great, why do I need this new/bloated/annoying stuff, etc. Until I started using it here and there and realized that most (not all, but most) of the bad things I heard about it was actually nonsense that people pass back and forth without really understanding it / being able to back it up with real experience.

Having logged almost 7 years with Vista x64 on my primary desktop, 4+ years with Win7 on my work laptop, as well as a few other computers, in parallel with XP on quite a few older setups, I can honestly say I like XP the least, even though I can perfectly deal with it.

And of course, again - we are on Vogons, where legacy/hardware software is of special interest. For such purpose, I would probably prefer XP (or even older) over anything newer most of the time. Heck, even Win98 SE has its niches. But for a modern primary PC, which I am sure all of us have - I cannot find a single reason to stay with it.

I think the thing to point out is that in the XP-days, hardware was very different from today.
We were only just ramping up from one core to two, and memory ranged from 256MB to 1GB normally.

Vista and later OSes were designed for systems with multiple cores, and much more memory.
For example, Vista introduced IO prioritizing, which groups IO-requests of processes together. Before this, IO requests would just be serviced as they came in, in 'random order'. This worked acceptably on a single-core system in most cases, since you only had one active process at a time.
However, with two or more cores, you can have multiple processes simultaneously banging away at your harddisk, in completely different areas, causing a lot more seeking to occur.
In Vista+, these requests are grouped somewhat, to reduce seeking and improve performance. You can actually *hear* this on a system with a mechanical harddrive. Just do some of your usual daily tasks of starting some applications and opening some documents etc. On XP your drive will make a lot more random seeking noises than on Vista+.

Likewise, things like memory allocation strategies need to be re-thought when the memory size and the amount of concurrent processes go up by orders of magnitude due to advances in hardware.
XP tends to work fine with systems of 1 GB or less, and one or two cores, the 'ideal window'... Add more memory, and it doesn't scale... Add more cores and it doesn't scale.
Vista+ will need at least 2 GB, and at least two cores, but once you're in that 'window', adding more memory and more cores will have a much more pronounced effect on how well the system multitasks and how smoothly things work.
On XP, I can't really tell the difference between my old Core2 Duo system and my Core i7. It's like the OS just doesn't know what to do with all those cores. On Vista+, you get more out of the Core i7. Clearly this OS understands what the hardware needs to do.

AFAIK The bloat in Windows Vista and 7 kinda nullified the speed gains through better hardware support.
I noted this thing before:
Getting an older version of Windows

I did find three articles from 2009, that concluded that Windows XP bests Vista and 7 in dual and quad core environment anyways, because of lower overhead.

I read Windows 8 dumped quite a bit of legacy components. So overhead may have been reduced, at the cost of not running some older apps. Either way, this topic needs better and more detailed benchmarks.

gerwin wrote:

AFAIK The bloat in Windows Vista and 7 kinda nullified the speed gains through better hardware support.

That's just a common myth.
More features don't necessarily make a system slower.
It's like saying Photoshop gets slower the more images you have on your harddrive, even though you never touch any of them with PhotoShop.
The images are just there. As long as you don't use them, they do not affect anything, except your diskspace.

Its easy to see how much faster Windows 6.X is compared to the old bloated slow Windows XP, just check the 3dmark 2001 thread and the Doom 3 thread... wait a min... 😜

Because of this the inverted advance in speed is more or less irrelevant though.

Scali wrote:

I think the thing to point out is that in the XP-days, hardware was very different from today.
We were only just ramping up from one core to two, and memory ranged from 256MB to 1GB normally.

Skyscraper wrote:

Its easy to see how much faster Windows 6.X compared to the old bloated slow Windows XP, just check the 3dmark 2001 thread and the Doom 3 thread... wait a min... 😜

In which cases you are not measuring the OS performance but rather the display driver performance.

Scali wrote:

That's just a common myth. More features don't necessarily make a system slower. It's like saying Photoshop gets slower the more […]
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gerwin wrote:

AFAIK The bloat in Windows Vista and 7 kinda nullified the speed gains through better hardware support.

That's just a common myth.
More features don't necessarily make a system slower.
It's like saying Photoshop gets slower the more images you have on your harddrive, even though you never touch any of them with PhotoShop.
The images are just there. As long as you don't use them, they do not affect anything, except your diskspace.

Like I said; It was an observation, it was measured. The common myth was that windows 7 ran DX9 games at higher FPS then XP.

"More features don't necessarily make a system slower" Sure, not necessarily, most data will just be generally idle, except during (un)install and backup. On the other hand, If the features require more logic+network checks and more graphics to throw around during program usage, it will take time.

Scali wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Its easy to see how much faster Windows 6.X compared to the old bloated slow Windows XP, just check the 3dmark 2001 thread and the Doom 3 thread... wait a min... 😜

In which cases you are not measuring the OS performance but rather the display driver performance.

Yes, just like a marathon dosnt measure your endurance but the quality of your shoes 😁

Skyscraper wrote:

Its easy to see how much faster Windows 6.X is compared to the old bloated slow Windows XP, just check the 3dmark 2001 thread and the Doom 3 thread... wait a min... 😜

What about some more modern benchmarks (those that still run on XP)?

With these things, tweaks may make a lot of difference, and drivers/software tend to get optimized for contemporary OSes.

dr_st wrote:

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?

It is stupid and doesn't make any sort of sense at all. I really can't think of a single reason why anyone would have a huge problem with running another third party program in addition to the many they already are running.

Also, in XP I need a third party program for decent file transfers, in Win7 I need one to get an up button in explorer. There is no OS that is perfect without third party software.

dr_st wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Its easy to see how much faster Windows 6.X is compared to the old bloated slow Windows XP, just check the 3dmark 2001 thread and the Doom 3 thread... wait a min... 😜

What about some more modern benchmarks (those that still run on XP)?

With these things, tweaks may make a lot of difference, and drivers/software tend to get optimized for contemporary OSes.

If you look into benchmarks like Frybench or AIDA64 there is no difference in performance.
XP-32, XP-64 and all Windows 6.x perform more or less the same.

These benchmarks measure hardware performance though and not OS performance 😉

The Doom 3 example is good for one reason, In XP even with a fast CPU all newer video cards and drivers perform more or less the same, I have tried a few combinations... The same CPU perform worse in Windows 6.x with the same video cards and drivers from the same time period. You have to excuse my mistake for thinking this could indicate increased overhead.

We can call it the "Windows 6.x video driver DX9 deficiency syndrome" instead if that would make everybody happy 😁, its the same with every driver and both AMD and Nvidia though.

Skyscraper wrote:

Yes, just like a marathon dosnt measure your endurance but the quality of your shoes 😁

No, not at all...
But such older games/graphics benchmarks are not taxing on the CPU whatsoever, and you're mainly measuring the path between GPU and CPU.
Vista and newer Windows have a different driver model and interface to the runtime API than XP did.
Therefore testing DX9 apps is never apples-to-apples anyway. Besides, testing such old games on drivers for OSes that didn't even exist is pretty much a guarantee that these drivers contain no specific optimizations for these games, while there were special optimized drivers for XP at the release.

So you're measuring *something*, but it's not what you think you're measuring.

Display drivers are a huge can of worms, with all sorts of hacks, cheats, application-specific workarounds and whatnot.

Skyscraper wrote:

If you look into benchmarks like Frybench or AIDA64 there is no difference in performance.
XP-32, XP-64 and all Windows 6.x perform more or less the same.

These benchmarks measure hardware performance though and not OS performance 😉

I disagree.
With modern OSes there is no direct path to the hardware. Everything is virtualized/abstracted, and the OS and its drivers are in charge of how resources are allocated to applications.
So if the performance is more or less the same, then that means that the level of overhead of this abstraction layer is about the same (and in the case of Windows it is generally quite thin, so the performance of the hardware shines through very well).

So basically you can't measure the OS performance, because the OS overhead is so minimal, which is exactly what you want.

obobskivich wrote:

"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 😵 ).

So, is there a means of disabling the firewall completely that reliably produces a measurable preformance increase?

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.

True enough, but most of the time it's reasonably straightforward to kill all of those.

dr_st wrote:

Vista was the worst among those OSes in terms of responsiveness, simply because Microsoft did not bother fine-tuning it.

I understood that many complaints about Vista were a result of systems being branded "Vista ready" when they in fact lacked the graphics hardware to adequately handle Aero.

ZellSF wrote:

in Win7 I need one to get an up button in explorer. There is no OS that is perfect without third party software.

If you are talking about the up one directory button, why not just use the bread crumbs in the address bar? It displays each of the parent directories and all you have to do is click on the one you want to open to navigate to that folder.

I understood that many complaints about Vista were a result of systems being branded "Vista ready" when they in fact lacked the graphics hardware to adequately handle

another big factor is Vista came out before 1gb+ of RAM was common. Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by making the minimum 512 since many 512mb machines came out and gave Vista a bad rep. Vista isn't that bad but it's unusable with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Preferably 2gb with a modern browser

collector wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

in Win7 I need one to get an up button in explorer. There is no OS that is perfect without third party software.

If you are talking about the up one directory button, why not just use the bread crumbs in the address bar? It displays each of the parent directories and all you have to do is click on the one you want to open to navigate to that folder.

Because that's a button I have to locate each time I want to go up a folder, as opposed to one I know where is, because you know, it doesn't move depending on which folder you are in.

Buttons that move depending on which folder you are in is terrible UI design.

smeezekitty wrote:

I understood that many complaints about Vista were a result of systems being branded "Vista ready" when they in fact lacked the graphics hardware to adequately handle

another big factor is Vista came out before 1gb+ of RAM was common. Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by making the minimum 512 since many 512mb machines came out and gave Vista a bad rep. Vista isn't that bad but it's unusable with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Preferably 2gb with a modern browser

Vista also had some problems initially, where eg the GDI-layer required a lot more memory than before.
A lot of early Vista issues were patched not too much later, but Vista's reputation was forever destroyed.

The problem with Vista was the "Vista Capable" system requirements that Microsoft allowed new shipping OEM machines to use. It was enough to lead to a lawsuit: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vi … icrosoft-bends/

Such machines couldn't run Aero at all as they didn't have WDDM drivers. One has to realize the state of the PC market in 2005-06. Windows XP's stagnation allowed OEMs to ship new hardware in very stripped down configurations since the OS was so old, but still current. Keep in mind that Direct3D 9 compatible GPUs with SM2.0 had been out since mid-2002, but many of these machines still came with garbage integrated video that worked with Direct3D 7 or 8 features at best. Vista would have forced them to release machines that actually had semi-decent 3D graphics, and more then 256-512MB of RAM that they were coming with. Shipping the machines with 1GB+ of RAM in 2006-07 was not unreasonable, yet some OEMs tried to get away with less.

That being said, XP was a real dog on period correct hardware too. Someone gave me a Sony VAIO from October of 2001 to recycle. It was likely one of the first machines shipped with it. Came with a 1Ghz P3 and 256MB of RAM..... and it crawled with XP RTM. The Netburst Celeron machines from the time period weren't much better.

dr_st wrote:

My point is that if one goes to apply tweaks to minimize footprint / increase responsiveness and what not, one will find that there are tweaks to apply to NT6 OSes as well, and that at the end, the result will be very similar.

Problem is, when it comes to NT6, you hit the wall pretty soon. You can only go so far before triggering stability issues. With WinXP, I'm able to tweak it down the point that idle CPU usage will be a perfect, steady 0%. With newer OS', there's always something going on behind the curtains that you just can't get rid of, and understandably so. As a 3.8ghz P4 user, being able to lend all CPU horsepower to a single application is purely a necessity and not a whim. With modern systems, however, you'd have no problem sacrificing one core to whatever the system will normally set itself to do.

dr_st wrote:

Now, even if in the end, you will achieve even 20% increase in responsiveness after countless tweaks, which will probably translate to a few seconds per day, is this really worth all the time invested into messing with it in the first place?

Whether it will be 20%, or 50% or whatever, that depends entirely on the state of the system at the time that the tweaks begin to take place, yet I've already invested all the time I needed to invest. The search for a perfectly tuned system has been over for years now. I know exactly what to do, how to do it, if I need to do it at all, so when it comes down to it, say a fresh WinXP install, it's barely going to take me a few minutes. Maintenance following installation, well, that's a different story, but it's really minuscule if you choose the right third party applications and use them correctly.

dr_st wrote:

Not to mention using an almost 15-year old operating system, without many nice UI enhancements put in starting from Win7 (Vista actually didn't have many of these), and which is already starting to hit the wall in terms of software forward-compatibility (in the sense that modern software already can't or won't run on XP)?

Whatever WinXP provides in terms of UI has so far been sufficient for me.

dr_st wrote:

Out of curiosity - what are these "countless privacy and security issues" you are talking about, that bother you so much with NT6-based Windows?

I would include NT5 as well, but at least in NT5 they are fixable. Take the search functionality itself, I've caught it calling Microsoft when searching files in my very own hard drive. I could go on forever on this, but I don't think we're on the right thread.

dr_st wrote:

And again, out of curiosity - how much time did you really spend with Vista/7/8 before condemning them so? Did you try to tweak them the way you tweak your XP?

It's been years of trial error and it never amounted to anything significant (bear in mind I'm the family/friends's techie so I get to fiddle around with this stuff a lot). Nevertheless, performance is only one of the many aspects I consider when it comes to choosing my everyday OS, so even if performance-wise I could get enough out of say, Win8 with the same hardware, it would still be useless for me.

dr_st wrote:

Heck, even Win98 SE has its niches. But for a modern primary PC, which I am sure all of us have - I cannot find a single reason to stay with it.

"Even"? Win98 was junk! It has it's place and time but...
You want a real legacy, multimedia OS? try Amiga Workbench 3.1!