“We’ve already posted our (WindowsXP) review, and we’ve already posted some tweaks you can do to get your new XP system up and going. Now we’re finally posting the one thing you guys probably wanted to see first – the numbers. Raw data on how this puppy performs.” FiringSquad is up to the task to measure XP’s performance on games, productivity and more.
FiringSquad on WindowsXP Performance
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Mixing NT (or whatever NT based technology) and DirectX and other fancy features isn’t a good idea. Do you like games?? use win98 (SE if you prefer). do you need windows for work (software development, cad, databases, etc.) use winNT4. . .
I would love to hear some justification for this comment. Some of us would like to use only one operating system most of the time, and do not wish to sacrifice the ability to play a game every now and then for poor speed and stability. Not to mention that there is absolutely, positively no reason why people should have to install and maintain a completely separate OS just to play games.
Stability is important to *everyone*. That means that you need something like the NT kernel underneath. If you want to say that DirectX and whatnot shouldn’t be in the business version of the OS, then that’s a much different proposition than what you suggested, although I would still disagree with it.
From my (admittedly still early and thus incomplete) experience, it looks like Microsoft succeeded wonderfully with the integration of multimedia and a solid kernel. My stability has been fantastic, the speed excellent, and my games performance extremely good.
So why, then, is it a bad idea?
I agree with bkakes, why shouldnt’t one OS do everything, isnt that the idea behind “media OS’s” like BeOS? I dont hear main people complaining that they combined a modern stable kernel with Multimedia features.
Hah, with multimedia XP is still monotasking. We tried XP on a dual PII800, it works a treat. But when we played an MP3 and then fired up IE6, the MP3 began to stutter, the same with an MPEG but more so. Switch off all the fancy stuff and it’s a bit better. Play any multimedia and you’re stuffed if ya wanna do anything more at the same time.
I’m listen to MP3’s all the time while using IE granted I’m using 2K right now and I haven’t bother to put IE6 back on but this is a P2 @ 300Mhz and I have a few other programs running in the bacgrond as well no stuttering I was watching MPEG’s before no stutetring DivX’s as well guess what no stutering. I doubt XP is that different that it would cause stuttering over 2K. Either you have a Crap Dual PIII800 (hey my P2 out performs it I’ll swap you
), you’ve configured it baldy or you’re just MS bashing.
I forgot option four you have a shody sound card.
Or a bad sound card driver, I not a big microsoft fan (but who is 😉 but the latest
release (XP) recognised all my hardware (radeon, xwave 6000) and it works quite nice.
Speedwise it would be about the same as NT5 (hey it is NT5.1)
But on an Athlon 1000@1333 🙂 it’s fast enough.
If you download powertoys, you can tweak most of the gui settings to something quicker,
and you get 4 workspaces (not as good as BeOS).
Nothing beats BeOS in easy of installation, but the partitioning of the
drive is improved, it shouldn’t overwrite the bootman loader however
and Microsoft should ease up about the registration crap, it could do without the
annoying 25 numbers long serial number. If they kick out their legal department they
would save a lot of money 🙂
As for the “competition”, I downloaded Xfree 4.1 for bsd 4.3 cause that seemed
to support my radeon card, the xf86cfg program is a joke.
I don’t want to configure my mouse it’s a PS/2 one around since last century.
I not a big fan either but bashing them just for the sake of it is childish.
It shouldn’t be to hard to get your ps/2 mouse to work although xf86cfg is a pain in the arse if you don’t get it set up right and have to contiually go throuh it a few times. I think power users would just edit the text file manually, which is probably why it hasn’t changed much over the past few years.
“We tried XP on a dual PII800, it works a treat. But when we played an MP3 and then fired up IE6, the MP3 began to stutter”
That’s an interesting result, since I get practically no MP3 or MPEG skipping whatsoever on my Celeron 566 overclocked to 850 (on a SBLive! value). I wonder if you’re leaving out something important…
> I’m listen to MP3’s all the time while using IE granted I’m using 2K right now and I haven’t bother to put IE6 back on
Oh dear me, you are rather dim. I use 2K and I have no problems with that OS. We’re running XP on the same machine with IE6 not 2K, and I did state that XP runs a treat. Why did you think I meant otherwise?
The fact of the matter is that XP does stutter MP3’s from CD when doing the odd task, I don’t think playing MP3’s has such a huge overhead. We have no problem doing this from 2K or BeOS, so why XP? Granted we haven’t spent hours tweaking XP, I did state that turning some of the fancy stuff off helps (quite a bit) but this is a multimedia extravaganza right?
Oh yeah I suppose Soundblaster do make the odd shody sound card. Works fine in 2K, Linux, QNX and Be. Like you say, it must be the user.
> I not a big microsoft fan (but who is 😉 but the latest
release (XP) recognised all my hardware
Indeed it also found all of our hardware, did I say it didn’t?
You need to learn to read, rather than jump the “MS bashing is soooo childish” bandwagon.
Rhubarb, rhubarb.
“The fact of the matter is that XP does stutter MP3’s from CD when doing the odd task”
Ah, so that’s what you left out. Most people assume you’re playing them from a network or a hard disk unless you state otherwise. Since I have not tried playing MP3s from CDs in WinXP, there’s nothing I can say about it.