Which OS is fastest
I have just done a highly unscientific experiment as to which operating system is the fastest to boot up from scratch, get a network and display my home page.
If it was a properly valid exercise then all machines would be identical in power, but they aren't.
First up is my main computer. It runs Windows Vista Home Premium on a dual 3.2 GHz processor with 4GB of RAM. It has the 2008 version of Norton Antivirus.
After 60 seconds it loaded the Windows Corporation logo and loading bar. After 1 minute, 25 it asked for a password. 1'39'' brought up the desktop, with the computer instantly connected to the wired network. iGoogle loaded after 2 minutes and 3 seconds. If I used the sleep facility I could bring it back to life in 14 seconds to a usable state.
Next I tried my JVC mininote 8 inch laptop - invented before netbooks were all the rage; but with more functionality. It's a good five years old but perfectly good running XP or Ubuntu Linux. But I decided to be cruel to it and put Windows 7 (Beta) on it to see if it works. It does work, depite the 512 MB of RAM not being enough to reach the required system requirements.
The little machine booted Windows 7 in 1'43'' but took an obscene 4'43'' to get a web page loaded. However the hybernate facility on Windows 7 appears to draw no energy out of the computer so can be used as an alternative to shut down. I re-awoke the laptop from hybernation in 1'21'' to view a web page.
A desktop computer with a pair of 2 GHz processors and 1 GB RAM booted Windows XP Pro in 42 seconds and loaded Google in a total of 1'30''.
A laptop with a single core 1.8GHz processor and 2GB RAM loaded a desktop in 1'12'' and got a web page in 1'27''.
Both the XP machines have AVG 7.5 installed.
The XP laptop also runs Ubuntu on a different partition. This took 1'34'' to load a desktop and 2'15'' for Firefox to display a web page. No anti virus is installed on this machine.
Finally, the old codger of a Mac I bought on Ebay a few weeks ago. This PowerMAc G4 has a 450 processor and 192MB RAM and is about 8 or nine years old. It runs Mac OS X, 10.3.9 - Panther. It booted the desktop fully in 57 seconds with Google loading in 1'45''.
So the winner is: Windows XP; loading a browser in a minute and a half on two seperate machines, but a lifetime achievement award has to go to the Mac which was ahead of a computer running a processor 15 times more powerful with 40 times more memory.
To make the experiment more valid I need to install the Beta of Windows 7 on a different machine and time that. It's not fair expecting it to work on an oldish laptop.
3 comments:
I installed Windows 7 on the laptop that had the fastest time with Ubuntu and XP.
1 minute 51 seconds to load a home page. So quicker than Vista on a slower machine. That has to be progress.
See I knew it was bollocks.
The time for the Vista start up seemed way too quick for me. It seems to boot up much faster if it isn't the first reboot of the day. So I timed it first thing.
4 minutes 32 seconds to load Google onto Firefox on my "fastest" computer.
The laptop mentioned above now has a solid state hard drive and runs the latest version of Ubuntu - 10.04, Lucid Lynx. It boots up as a workable machine in 23.3 seconds which I think is pretty impressive. It takes an additional 26 seconds to find a hidden wireless network. So that's well within a minute to be surfing the internet.
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