• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Who says Win7 is better than WinXP?

Chuck(G)

25k Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2007
Messages
44,228
Location
Pacific Northwest, USA
I had some time over the weekend to conduct an experiment that I've been meaning to do for years.

I took a 3.0GHz/800 Prescott P4 HT system with 2GB of memory and a SATA HD and loaded up Xubuntu 16.04 LTS on it. I then installed WinXP and Win7 allowing for 1GB of memory space under VirtualBox. (I have licensed copies of both--early Win7 didn't appeal to me, so the DVD went onto the shef, along with Win8 and Vista).

Now there are those who say that Win7 is so much better--and faster--than XP. Not in my experience! Side-by-side with identical installations of Firefox showed that Win7 was perhaps only half as fast as XP. I suspect that Win2K would be even faster--VBbox would certainly suport it.

So what I'm I missing? Is the superiority of Win7 over XP just a bunch of smoke shoveling?
 
What you are missing is the wild marketing that makes everyone THINK that newer is always "better". :p

Also, was that Windows 7 32-bit or Windows 7-64 bit. Apparently the 64-bit version requires twice as much RAM. Frik if I know why, most memory usage these days should be with data, not code. It shouldn't matter much that 64-bit aligned code takes up more space. I'm sure somebody else will be along saying you need over 9000GB ram or something to make it faster with no explanation as to why.

Perhaps you should do like every good consumeroid and install some burn-out-your-retina blue LEDs to blind you from the fact that you are using black piles of sludge pooped out of some Chinese or Indian's butt.

Of course, if you think all of that is bad, you don't want to go anywhere near Windows Advertising Edition, I mean Windows 10.
 
Your linux bias is showing. Putting win7 on a on that P4 is like putting XP on a pentium. Its obvious to me your test is a bit biased. Also, there is a VM in the way. I highly doubt that P4 has the technology to properly run VM machines.

For a 64 bit system, win7 is the way to go. xp is for 32.

10 isn't bad. I really wish I could stay on 7, but I need DX12 for things.
 
When my P4 3.0 was my daily driver, I tried out Vista and 7 on it. Vista was mortifying, 7 worked OK, but I ended up going back to XP for the speed

But as for "better":
I like plugging in devices, and having my OS automatically download and sort out the driver for me.
I like being able to search the start menu with one keypress without downloading a third party program.
I like being forced to approve system changes when a program decides it needs to alter things outside it's safe space
I like having native support for technologies like trim on my SSDs
I find the memory management on Win7+ to be much more efficient, it'll use the majority of RAM as a cache, but when you need memory it'll magically shrink. XP had a fixed ratio from memory.
I like buying a game, and using the latest DirectX to get the most out of my hardware
Windows XP I'd reinstall every 12-24 months, and reboot once a week. Since Windows 7, and now Windows 10, the only time I reboot is for Windows update and I'm yet to ever need to reinstall any system (other than hard drive failures).

On a Pentium 4, XP is better choice than 7 in my opinion. But Windows 7 is the better OS.
Windows 95 doesn't run great on a 386 either.

For what it's worth, I bought a new computer on Sunday for 1/3 of what my first Windows PC cost in 1995 - and I boot Windows 10 in a few seconds on a computer that makes no noise.
If people want performance, it's not expensive, and 7/8/10 are quite efficient compared to what Windows 95, 2K and Vista were to machines when they first shipped.**


** Win2K feels fast now, but on my P2-350 back then, I preferred Windows 98! Windows 95 turned my fast Pentium 75 in to a slow turtle, and Vista seems to run slow for no good reason - upgrading to 7 fixed that for every system I've used it with.
 
What's wrong with XP on a Pentium? When "whistler" was beta testing, that's what I ran it on. It ran fine. Of course, it got progressively slower over the years as it got larded up. But I still run XP on P3 systems with no problem.

VBox runs on Linux, but it also runs on Windows. The point of using it was to eliminate any possible differences in drivers that might afford an unfair advantage.

I'm trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison, so bringing in 64 bit and attempting to compare it against 32 is a bit of a red herring. Of course, I can load up Win 7 64-bit and XP Pro x64 under 64bit VBox--and will, if you think that Win7 will prevail.

So how say you?
 
To really get the benefits of Windows 7 requires a dual core, 2 GB of memory, and a larger memory video card. Windows 7 places most of the OS functionality in a separate SYSTEM user which carries the memory hit of an extra user. About 256 MB on my system. Additionally, Windows 7 caches images of all the windows for many of the new features but that can use about 5 MB per window. VirtualBox does not support all the video acceleration functions that Windows 7 passes on to web browsers.

This test is one that disadvantages Windows 7. Windows 7 can't use new faster APIs because the virtualized hardware does not include the needed functionality but Windows 7 uses more memory. Net result: Windows 7 is worse. Try it with a modern quad core with a larger memory pool and a recent video card and see how well Windows 7 really works.

Windows 10 has an improved kernel. I don't understand how so many utilities like search were made less useful in the design update. I am probably uninstalling it from some systems. Whoever it was that decided to fill web browser start pages with ads for mortgage scams needs to find a different line of work. When the OS by design includes ads that will get me to lose clients, I need to lose the OS.
 
in my experiance with my single core 1.6ghz 2gb ram atom netbook 7 with the basic win 9x/2000 theme was faster than XP

Not very much but slightly faster, what your missing is the endless memory pit bogware that is firefox. I dont have exact numbers anymore (I still have the netbook if anyone wants a pissing contest) but on that machine it was close to 2 min to load firefox, chrome was below 1 min, which kinda was the final nail in the coffin after using firefox since it was mozilla (that and if they are going to force me to use a chome interface might as well use chrome)


that was full XP with final updates vs whatever 7 was at 2 years ago


What I have felt was every XP machine I put 7 on and didnt overdo it, 7 made it FEEL more snappy, which as a end user, is what I want, not that it saves me X time in some application I may never run, but how fast does it whip open the file explorer, how fast does it search etc
 
I found them to be about equivalent on real hardware with all of the flashy GUI bits turned off on both. This was at a previous job where we provided Windows-based PCs running our tool's application suite to customers, and had to use the OS specified by the customer at the time (XP wasn't EOL at that point).

Note, I have no actual hard benchmarks or anything to back that up. Just that Win7 didn't feel slower than WinXP on the same hardware, not the way that Vista felt slower.
 
So, basically the Win7 vehicle performs better than XP when you put in a bigger engine and fuel tank? :huh:

FWIW, this was also for my own edification. I run Linux day-to-day with XP in VirtualBox (as well as 98se and a few other OSes) when I absolutely need the Windows functionality. My curiosity was if there was anything to be gained by upgrading XP to Win7 in that environment.

Not that I could tell.
 
I don't know about that. Plenty of people were running it on netbooks that can't be much, if at all, more powerful than a high end P4.

win7 had no business on atom either. The first gen chips were slow. But they were great if you used them properly, even with win7. Basic web browsing, typing a paper, etc. ssse3 and sse4 were important to have in these cases. The general public did not understand the 2.5W atom was a wholly different cpu than anything prior. Laptop manufacturers were pressured to use win7 probably because of the general public being what it is. I have an atom, I have it with xp, and it does xp things very well.
 
So, basically the Win7 vehicle performs better than XP when you put in a bigger engine and fuel tank? :huh:

FWIW, this was also for my own edification. I run Linux day-to-day with XP in VirtualBox (as well as 98se and a few other OSes) when I absolutely need the Windows functionality. My curiosity was if there was anything to be gained by upgrading XP to Win7 in that environment.

Not that I could tell.

oddly enough Xbuntu (which is base ubuntu with XFCE) actually runs a bit slower on my notebook than windows 7 did out of the box, course its linux so you can trim the fat all the way to the bone so the system that's on it now is real snappy ... but requires a nerd to sit down and dick with it, and arguably a nerd that has time to sit down and dick with it could probably get very close with a winders system
win7 had no business on atom either. The first gen chips were slow. But they were great if you used them properly, even with win7. Basic web browsing, typing a paper, etc. ssse3 and sse4 were important to have in these cases.

dunno slap a IDE SSD and 2 gig's of ddr2 ram on it my old single core atom actually made a decent ps2 era game player and media center :) certianly did better than the 1.2ghz AMD XP that I had when 7 came out hehe (other than video I had a geforce 9600GT)
 
Yea that is a bit of the PC master coming out isn't it

Unlike vista it doesn't take a whole lot for 7 to run
 
If what you need to run works on XP I don't see the point of running Windows 7.

XP does not seem to use a 4 core system well, and with a decent video card you get even less of the 4GB of RAM ceiling to use.

My main system is ancient, 8GB DDR2 Radeon 4870 1GB Opteron 1385 (4 core 2.7ghz) 2TB spinning HD, and it runs Win 7 x64 very well. XP would be a major downgrade for this setup. It runs well enough that I never tried OS 8.x or the free upgrade to 10.

I also admit I never tried Vista since I stuck to XP for a long time.
 
Ah, so, by extension--I have no business running Win 7 on any VirtualBox setup. Okay, back on the shelf.

NvhNnJX.jpg


The issue here is running win7 on a pentium 4, not about VM machines. I will admit, running win7 in a VM on hardware designed for NEITHER, isn't helping. However claiming it's all win7's fault is outright wrong. I run win7 in a VM on my win10 machine. Runs perfectly. But my hardware was designed to do both tasks.
 
I've run them all on just about all hardware. Other than the add-ons from every succeeding Microsoft O/s's I've found no major benefit from Vista through Ten except the need for ever-increasing amounts of memory, complexity and storage space. I also found incompatibilities in screen and audio features. Otherwise, base features have seldom changed save for hardware feature additions.
 
ifi you want to throw a strawman flag dont start the argument with "BS has no biz on horsecrap rarawrar!!!!!!" highly opinionated, seriously lacking in fact ranting all within the first sentence.

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor*

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

shit you can run it (actually surprisingly well) on a pentium 3
 
The issue here is running win7 on a pentium 4, not about VM machines. I will admit, running win7 in a VM on hardware designed for NEITHER, isn't helping. However claiming it's all win7's fault is outright wrong. I run win7 in a VM on my win10 machine. Runs perfectly. But my hardware was designed to do both tasks.

Now wait just a second. I suggested a side-by-side of XP x64 and Win 7 x64:

I'm trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison, so bringing in 64 bit and attempting to compare it against 32 is a bit of a red herring. Of course, I can load up Win 7 64-bit and XP Pro x64 under 64bit VBox--and will, if you think that Win7 will prevail.

and your next post was:

no, you're putting windows 7 on a system that has no business running it.

Now clearly, a P4 doesn't run x64 code, so what were you talking about?
 
Back
Top