BANGALORE, INDIA: Windows 7 being the cover story this time, we have decided to benchmark it against three Linux and two Windows operating systems. These include Fedora 11, Ubuntu 9.04, Open SuSE 11.2, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate RTM.
Boost up your Windows XP performance
We considered both 32-bit and 64 bit versions of the Operating Systems. We tested them on an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor based machine with 4GB of DDR-3 RAMand a 80GB SSD hard-drive. The biggest challenge for us was arranging for a benchmark which could run on both x86 and x64 architecture, and at the same time can run on all OSes including different variants of Windows and Linux.
We finally zeroed in on a benchmark called Geekbench from Primate Labs. This is one of the very few benchmarks that can run on any OS and any architecture including Windows, Linux and Mac. You can even download and use the x86 version of Geekbench for free from http://www.primatelabs.ca /geekbench/.
Jazz up your apps on Windows 7
While analyzing the performance of different operating systems with Geekbench, we also checked other aspects of the OSes, such as boot-up and shutdown time, installation and time taken for copying a 100MB file from the HDD to USB, HDD to HDD and USB to HDD. The results we got were very interesting.
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Here you can easily make out that the performance of Windows 7 and Vista are best when compared with other operating systems. Plus a 64-bit version of Windows 7/Vista gives around 10% more performance.
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64-bit or 32-bit OS
This is an old question, but very much valid even today. People hardly think of going for a a 64-bit OS if their RAM is not more than 4GB. However, all desktop processors today as we know except Atom are 64-bit and support 32-bit applications. This makes for a big question -should we really go for a 64-bit OS which also requires more space than its counterpart on your hard-drive. We would say yes, as our test shows, at least.
In our test bed, each and every OS showed certain amount of performance difference ranging from a mere 1% to as much as 12% to 13%. And if you're going to install Windows Vista or Windows 7, a 64-bit variant is of course better, as both OSes gave around 12 to 13 percent performance benefit with their 64-bit variant. But in both cases, the additional toll on the storage was around 40%. Both the OSes took around 4GBs extra while installing their 64-bit variant. However, given the capacity of today's HDDs, this 4GB shouldn't be a constraint for selecting a 64-bit OS.
