[CalcProgrammer1]

I decided to install 6801 on my ThinkPad to see how Microsoft's new OS will fare on old machines. I have Windows XP Home, Ubuntu 8.10, and Windows 7 on it right now, so I figure I should compare all 3.

Startup Time
Startup time is an important aspect of an OS. Weird Al once said "You're usin' a 286, don't make me laugh, your Windows boots up in what? a day and a half?" in reference to old computers getting horrendous boot times. I'm recording the time between the computer starting to load the OS (after the BIOS screen, GRUB menu, and Windows bootloader) to when the Desktop is fully shown on screen (not all startup processes necessarily have started, just to when the desktop shows up).

Windows XP Home: 32.1 seconds
Windows 7 Ultimate: 1:13.16
Ubuntu 8.10: 1:14.08

The Result: XP smoked the competition! Both Ubuntu and Windows 7 took over twice as long to boot. Ubuntu and Windows 7 came so close that it is probably too close to call which one is actually faster to load. Either way, XP is the clear cut winner.

RAM usage
This is how much physical and virtual RAM is used by the OS and startup programs.

Windows XP Home: 391 Available/512MB Physical RAM (121/512MB used)
Windows 7 Ultimate: 340/512MB Physical Used, 390/1535MB virtual used
Ubuntu 8.10: 174MB/502MB Physical Used (I don't have a swap partition, so no virtual)

XP wins again, holding the lightest memory footprint of the three. Ubuntu is close with only 174MB total, while 7 is a monstrous 730MB total, with half that eating up precious physical RAM and the other half lagging away on the hard drive. While this is better than Vista's 1GB+ memory footprint, it isn't anywhere near what it could be, but I would still say that 7 is an improvement over Vista. Again, XP wins.

Driver Support

The PC has a Pentium 3 Processor, an ATi Rage Mobility 128 M3 graphics chip, a USB controller, an IR port, a Broadcom-based PCMCIA WiFi card, a D-Link PCMCIA Ethernet card, and a 1600x1200 screen.

Windows XP Home: Windows XP has been around for 5 years. During this long lifetime, it has become one of the most supported OS'es ever. Pretty much everything works in XP, though you have to download drivers for the PCMCIA network cards. I had to use the ATi driver provided on IBM's site, but it enabled OpenGL and DirectX acceleration.

Windows 7 Ultimate: Windows 7 is built on Windows Vista, which is in turn built on XP. As long as you're using 32 bit, drivers don't seem to be too big of an issue, as I got a few XP drivers to work fine in Windows 7. The sound drivers were not installed out of the box like they were in XP, but after looking through Windows Update, the system automatically found working drivers. Both PCMCIA networking cards were supported out of the box, without having to download from the Internet. IRDA was installed out of the box as well. I had to use Compatibility Mode to use the XP mode installer for the ATi graphics, but after rebooting I have OpenGL acceleration. I would again say everything works.

Ubuntu 8.10: This can be a bit of a pain to configure. For one, the Broadcom-based networking card is powered by a restricted driver, so you have to connect to the Internet to download the driver for it, which means using the Ethernet card (supported by default). Once it installs, WiFi is fine. Despite a problematic display in the LiveCD and a limited 640x480 resolution after initial boot-up, a proper xorg.conf will enable 3d acceleration on OpenGL and a full 1600x1200 screen. In Ubuntu, although it is tougher to configure, pretty much everything works.

It may be tough, but all 3 OS'es work fine with this system in terms of hardware. XP is probably the easiest, seeing as IBM's site has XP drivers and you don't have to jump through compatibility mode hoops to install them, but then again, 7 does autodetect my network cards, which took the most Googling to find drivers for, so I would probably go with a Tie, between Windows XP and Windows 7 but as for strictly compatibility (not difficulty of installation), Three-way Tie, all working 100%.

Overall: Windows XP wins. Why? It's fast...really fast. It works with everything that Windows 7 does but is faster to load, lighter on RAM, and works a bit quicker as well. Ubuntu is reasonably fast, but it takes forever to load and can be difficult for new users to install on.

[Hefemeister]

If you give like 10 results (I would assume boot time is normally distributed) we could run a t-test to see if there is a statically significant difference in boot times between ubuntu and win 7.

[Mak213]

I would hope a product that has been out 7 years would be able to beat out a product that has been out a month. If not then that doesnt bode well for the product that has been out since 2001.

[CalcProgrammer1]

I was actually surprised how Win7 booted about the same as Ubuntu. Ubuntu is well within the system requirements, Windows 7 is not even designed to run on this PC, yet they both boot in the same amount of time.

[Mak213]

Well as i have said and been trying to say. Win7 will be fantastic. They are doing some major overhauls to it. The Kernel itself is going to be so condensed and optimized that it should even be smaller than Win XP's Kernel by the time they are done.

In another year by the time the Beta gets out and they really do work on it you should be hard pressed to hear someone say stick with XP over Win7.

[CalcProgrammer1]

That's why I'm testing it on old hardware, that's where you'll see the differences between XP and 7 the most. Sure, loading it on your new gaming PC may have a few seconds of difference, but on old hardware the differences really show. Can't wait for Beta to come out to see how it compares.

[saltynay]

compare with Maryan that distro is like lightening as its designed for old hardware and a small footprint it is the fastest fully functional distro I have used. ubuntu sounds like it may be badly configured (no offence) if it was beat by xp, do you have loads of stuff on it or just the core programs? Had xp been optimised via msconfig and service panels to increase speed?

[CalcProgrammer1]

None of them were optimized, just normal old installs. Ubuntu may be running slowly because I had installed Xubuntu then installed ubuntu-desktop on top of it, but it still loads the same way so I'm not sure why it'd run any slower/faster with a normal CD install.