Windows XP vs Windows Vista performance

[@RuruFIN]

Vista was bashed mostly as it was preinstalled on prebuilts with a single-core CPU paired with 1GB of RAM in most cases. I remember having an E6400 @ 3.4GHz & 4GB RAM, it ran perfectly fine.

[@mixermaster10]

Ie, I had one of those. Got it for free from our carrier when got internet in 2k7 ors: Celeron 420 with 1 gb of ram, it worked doe i never had massive issues with it prob also cuz i didnt have aero cuz home basic edition lol

[@MidnightGeek99]

That's right, bad marketing, and that sticker with "Vista Ready" was a very bad idea, companies sticked those logos on every garbage PC.

[@Pasi123]

When my dad was looking for a laptop for my mom just few months before Vista came out there was still many XP laptops with only 256MB RAM. The one he bought was a Fujitsu Siemens with a Celeron M 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM, ATI Xpress 200M. Even that 512MB RAM wasn't great for XP and definitely wouldn't have been good for Vista even though it was the official minimum requirement

[@excess.subiefl0w]

16 years ago wtffff I remember it like yesterday

[@RuruFIN]

Yeah, time flies..

[@MidnightGeek99]

Yes :)

[@bojinglebells]

I made the swap to Vista (x64 Ultimate) using a Core 2 Quad that I had overclocked to 3.2GHz, 8GB of RAM, and an 8800GTX. Gaming might have been faster on XP, but the everyday use experience with all that extra RAM plus Vista's new SuperFetch was the biggest improvement I remember having in computing before SSDs took over. I never had any problems with Vista and really loved my experience with it.

[@MidnightGeek99]

That's right, if you had a powerful enough PC, Vista was the way to go. I would not be surprised if with your configuration, Vista would be faster.

[@2007tantrum]

Dear friend, in 2006 and 2007 when was XP SP2, Vista was as RTM / SP0 edition. Then in 2008 SP3 came out for XP, and SP1 come for Vista. SP 2 for Vista was released only in 2009. Interesting to compare with Seven RTM / SP0

[@MidnightGeek99]

Vista was released in 2007, and SP2 for Vista in 2009.

[@2007tantrum]

@@MidnightGeek99 A business-oriented Enterprise edition, was made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006. Windows Vista was, launched for general customer availability on January 30, 2007. There was possibility when installing 2006 edition to choose also Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate. And later activate it with key from 2007 box edition. Only thing is to decide what edition you want. I don’t remember could you upgrade or downgrade between editions when system already installed

[@oldhuntersu]

Good and thoughtful research, NightGeek. And although XP is the best operating system from Microsoft, I think that Vista is also a great operating system. It's just that Vista came out too early, it was still raw, and users weren't ready for it. In fact, the famous Vista-based 7 was just a slight reinvention of Vista and a more finely polished version, achieving the status of one of the greatest operating systems. Good luck with your work, my friend!

[@MidnightGeek99]

Thank you :) You are right, depending on your hardware back then, you could have had a great experience with Vista, I did, with a Core 2 Duo.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Excellent video, like!

[@MidnightGeek99]

Thank you :)

[@chazbotic]

Excellent comparison video! thanks so much for taking my suggestion - you've done a very good comparison video! i remember some people were worried about the "phone home" situation with Windows XP, and rushed out to buy boxed copies of windows 2000 instead. rumors at the time was that many game then would actually have pretty decent performance on windows 2000, however driver issues were the problem most of the time. i skipped vista entirely and went from xp to windows 7, mostly because i didn't feel like buying just an OS and none of the hardware i bought at the time came with Vista bundled other than a laptop. after the 1st patch, vista actually ran pretty decently on the laptop and was fast and responsive with 4gb of RAM, but unpatched it was awful and had many annoyances. the way that vista was locked to the motherboard via license key was super bad since of course i would upgrade sometimes which would requite new activation. this was also the time when ubisoft was super bad about denuvo and securom and ea's 3 lifetime activations per key and other insanity. now i'm wondering if the people that were service pack cultists (SP1, SP2, dread lord SP3) were right in that each one made performance worse and worse as bugs were fixed and the OS size on disk made things bloated and slow...

[@MidnightGeek99]

Thank you, and thank you :)) I did not skip Vista, at least for a while, but I'm sure that after a few months I went back to XP, and then upgraded to the preview version of Windows 7, which lasted for about a year or so. Laptops with Vista...I have bad memories :)

[@nitroseven]

i have a clevo m570tu from 2008 irrc. my vista installation sadly f’ed up and i lost everything. i think i will try xp since driver support is perfect (thanks clevo!)

[@MidnightGeek99]

XP driver support is everything you need in this life, enjoy if you have it!

[@nitroseven]

@@MidnightGeek99 so it’s been about 2 weeks and i’ll say the xp experience is better on real hardware than vms. the gaming performance was only a bit better than vista like 5% difference. i speculate that my hardware did just fine on vista (qx9300 quad overclocked to 2.93, gtx 9800m also overclocked, 4gb ddr3) and that’s why it’s only a bit faster. vista is a masterpiece in visuals however so idk if i’ll upgrade again. still real bothered about what happened last time

[@RaPtOr9600]

My experience with Vista Installed it on E5200 and 2 GB DDR II, circa 2008 Launched it enabled aero, installed drivers, installed games, reset PC got BSO, back to XP. Didn't touch it since 2008 :)

[@MidnightGeek99]

:)) You should give it a try, playing some GoG games on Vista gives you a...calming vibe, it's zen! For real now, tell me that Vista looks bad!

[@vojtechadame5860]

I don´t see there any sensible reason to use XP x64. It has no use, because if you need to run old software, XP x32 has better compatibility. If you want to use something more modern, you can grab Vista or 7. Agree or not?

[@mistermudpie]

Not.

[@MidnightGeek99]

XP x64 has some niche uses, like everything else :) Well, almost anything, I don't see any reason for Windows Me.

[@Devilot91]

all I can say, even before opening the video is that for me Vista after all upgrades was a valid system. I still have it on my all in one HP pc from 2009 with Vista Ultimate SP2 for offline gaming and it works perfectly smooth. It boots even faster than my 2014 Windows 11 laptop, so for me Vista still rocks.

[@MidnightGeek99]

I'm trying to do the same, an offline PC for 2006-2010 gaming, based on Vista.

[@Mini-z1994]

The biggest complaint with Vista was that many computers were basically meeting the minimum system requirements. Like 512 mb ram with a single sempron processor at 2.2 ghz & a 40 gb ide hdd kind of slow. Once you got a 2 ghz+ dualcore & 2 gb ram or more it was fine too use.

[@MidnightGeek99]

Exactly, I've jumped ship to Vista after I got a Core 2 Duo and a 7900 GS...you simply can't deny that Vista looks absolutely gorgeous.

[@Mini-z1994]

@@MidnightGeek99 Yep, perfectly fine OS, though the user account control was definitely turned off pretty quickly.

[@rtmclean484]

Great thorough video! Greetings from Ireland!

[@MidnightGeek99]

Thank you very much :)

[@mistermudpie]

I actually used XP x64 for a few good years! Why, you might ask? Well, I was rocking a CRT monitor that I refused to let go of and the refresh rate override tool I used in XP to make sure games didn't completely destroy my eyes at 60Hz no longer worked in Vista. Factor in that I also wanted to make sure my 4GB of ram were properly utilized by the operating system, and suddenly XP x64 became the only viable solution. And, amazingly enough, it worked fine for me.

[@MidnightGeek99]

XP x64 works fine, there are some things that don't recommend it, but that depends on your usage of the OS.

[@foch3]

I went back to XP64 after using vista for a couple of months. I never had any issues with XP 64.

[@MidnightGeek99]

You might have, depending on your hardware, but not Windows Me-level of problems.

[@dabombinablemi6188]

I was able to play Oblivion with my FX 5700 (it was the slowest part of the machine according to the experience index) and Sempron 2800+ under Vista with 2GB RAM. Can't really use 2GB anymore if I want to dual boot Vista with 98SE (a shame since I am using a 250GB HDD from a 2008 Vista laptop) - motherboard freaks out with more than 1GB RAM (or dual sided DIMM) installed under 9x when running a 400MHz FSB due to my "new" Athlon XP. BSOD galore.

[@MidnightGeek99]

You really maxed out that configuration, with Oblivion and Vista :) Reading about dual sided DIMMs made me think...again, about Asus and their older motherboards...man...

[@dabombinablemi6188]

​@@MidnightGeek99 It ended up being a happy coincidence that Oblivion happened to have the FX 5700 (and even the 5700LE) as the minimum requirements...as well as a 2GHz single core CPU. TBH with Oblivion the CPU seems to be more of an issue in regard to how poorly the game runs - the difference between the full 5700 and a 128bit LE with DDR 320 really isn't significant. At one point I had my 5600XT (reference specs) installed to test its new cooler and forgot about it - Oblivion was still playable despite the lower core clock, lacking a Vertex shader and some of the architectural improvements that NV36 had (apparently there were some computational differences that made some operations faster clock for clock the higher up you went).

[@RandomBSOD]

And this comparison was made using XP SP2, imagine the difference if you had used XP SP3 which was even more optimized 🤔

[@MidnightGeek99]

Is XP SP3 more optimized?

[@A-BYTE64]

it main feature was good 64-bit support, but back then not many programs were able to take advatage from it and only the newst hardware would take advantage from it and for many people with Athlons XP and Pentiums 4 Windows XP 32-bit was just a better choice

[@MidnightGeek99]

Yeah, the only immediate advantage of x64 was that you could use more than 3.2 GB of RAM.

[@Liske-]

Windows Vista looks very good, unfortenatly its bad :(

[@MidnightGeek99]

It's ok, if you use it properly :)

[@P9HL2BETA]

I remember hearing so many bad things about Vista back in the day that I completely skipped it, never daring to install, even out of curiosity, same thing happened with 8 / 8.1. Now it looks like it might happen once more with 11. GG Microsoft, gg... Vista was so unpopular that I only remember using it once at a friend (actually trying to reinstall XP since he was having issues with Vista). Even school computers didn't bother with it, jumping from XP straight to 7 :))

[@MidnightGeek99]

It was a mess, yes, but now, having all the knowledge that we have, Vista might be a wonderful system for some old-school DirectX 10 gaming.

[@P9HL2BETA]

@@MidnightGeek99 Btw, poate fac ceva gresit dar invite-ul pentru discord este invalid :)

[@MidnightGeek99]

@@P9HL2BETA Am rezolvat, mc.

[@SBTKostya2008]

XP SP2 in 2004 and Vista SP2 in 2009.

[@MidnightGeek99]

Yes :)

[@gert106xsi]

I had a good pc back when Vista came out, so I have really no complain about Vista. But I also got WIndows 8 and that was a horrible nightmare.

[@MidnightGeek99]

Why Windows 8 a nightmare?

[@gert106xsi]

@@MidnightGeek99 I never got used to the tiled GUI, I hated it with a passion The 8.1 update with the normal start menu was fine.

[@gert106xsi]

It is like Windows 11 with all the buttons centered, first I do after installing it is lining it to the left. The apprentice system admin asked why? Because it is so since windows 95😂

[@MidnightGeek99]

:)) You don't understand, it's a "modern" paradigm!

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

I did use XP 64 bit when I got my Athlon 64 I wanted it just because it was newer and I thought better. Vista was not out at that time. In retrospect it was a bad choice since it had a lot of issues and with only 2GB of RAM 64 but was a waste. But for me all I knew was that 64 was higher than 32 so I had to have it.

[@MidnightGeek99]

Yeah, 64 is higher than 32 :)) Vista turned decent after a while, just like the Nintendo Gamecube...maligned back then, accepted afterwards, just like an artist, not appreciated in his day and age :)

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

@@MidnightGeek99 I always have thought Vista was the best looking Windows. 7 is better in almost every other way though but Vista became a lot better with the service packs.

[@xanelgames]

XP vs 7

[@MidnightGeek99]

Incoming :)

[@xanelgames]

@@MidnightGeek99 \o/

[@zaharijamorato7905]

that is all just because xp is lighter to run

[@MidnightGeek99]

Indeed.