Operating system SmackDown: Windows 8 blitzes XP on 7 year old hardware
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Join For Free“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 | ![]() |
26 min 12 sec |
Boot | ![]() |
17 sec |
Open Word Doc | ![]() |
4.3 sec |
Open PDF doc | 3.4 sec | ![]() |
Load troyhunt.com in IE | ![]() |
7.9 sec |
Open Photoshop file | ![]() |
41.5 sec |
PassMark PerformanceTest | ![]() |
356.5 |
Published at DZone with permission of Troy Hunt, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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