February 18th, 2008

Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 - Part Deux

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 2:13 am

Categories: On the test bench, Vista

Tags: Result, Disk, Load, Operating System, Service Pack 2, Problem, Microsoft Windows Vista, Difference, Microsoft Windows Vista SP1, Test System

The Test

This time we’re going to combine synthetic benchmarks with real-world operations.  To put that in simpler terms, we’re going to carry out a background file copy of multiple files (2,000 files in 40 folders, 3.8GB) while running a PassMark PerformanceTest 6.1 benchmark.

Note:  Note that this system is not representative of the kind of PCs around when XP SP2 was released.  Also, this system predates the release of Vista by a few months.

The test system is the same system detailed here.

Note:  With PassMark ratings, the higher the number, the better the score.

First, a baseline was established by benching the systems under no load.  We use our usual number crunching method of making four separate benchmark runs, remembering to reboot, defrag, and force the processing of idle tasks between each run.  We then examined the four results, discarded the lowest score and averaged the remaining results.

Note:  The only change that was made to Windows Vista SP1 for this test was to disable Windows Defender.  Testing indicates that the effect that Windows Defender has on file copy in Vista SP1 is negligible, but to satisfy the critics I chose to disable it for this test.

Using this method we ended up with the following PassMark ratings for the systems.

Average PassMark ratings:

• XP SP2: 509.0
• Vista SP1: 469.5

   
XP SP2 results on the left, Vista SP1 on the right.

Based on these results from the synthetic benchmark, XP SP2 gets a PassMark rating that’s 8.4% greater than Vista SP1. 

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