Operating system SmackDown: Windows 8 blitzes XP on 7 year old hardware

“Why should I be forced to upgrade?! I’m happy with my 11 year old OS dammit!”

“I’m sick of Microsoft always changing things!”

“Get off my lawn ya damn kids!”

But most interestingly:

“Why should I be forced to upgrade my hardware to run this new OS?!”

Really? I mean I know there’s this unwritten law that newer software requires more resources but my experience with Windows 8 has always been that’s it’s way faster certainly than Windows 7 was on the same hardware, but it’s my recollection that XP was never really as snappy as 8 is now on any hardware. So I dug up the oldest, crustiest hardware I could get my hands on and did some tests:

If you just want to skip straight to the results, here’s the rundown:

Lenovo T60 (released in 2006)
1GB of 987 MHz RAM
1.83 GHz Intel core duo CPU
7,200 RPM mechanical drive

And the results:

	Windows 8	Windows XP
Installation	24 min 55 sec	26 min 12 sec
Boot	6 sec	17 sec
Open Word Doc	3.4 sec	4.3 sec
Open PDF doc	3.4 sec	2.8 sec
Load troyhunt.com in IE	2.9 sec	7.9 sec
Open Photoshop file	16.5 sec	41.5 sec
PassMark PerformanceTest	407.5	356.5