Windows Vs Linux
The duel seems to be ever enduring. However, in our test bed, Windows did better in terms of sheer performance than Linux. The performance of Windows Vista and Windows 7 was around 10% better than that of OpenSuSE and was around 40% better than Fedora and Ubuntu. This is indeed a substantial difference. But yes, if you are on a HDD space diet, then Linux makes more sense as it takes up around one third the space of its counterpart, and additionally gives you so many applications including Office Suite, lots of games, image manipulation software, etc along with the OS.

If, money is not the only deciding factor, then you have good amount of storage space to spare, and you are not a diehard fan of FOSS, then Windows 7 and Windows Vista do make a lot of sense over the free Linux variants.

Win 7 Vs Win Vista
We came across in our test an unexpected fight between the two, while we figured out that the performance of Windows 7 and Windows Vista is actually at par. Windows Vista rather outshone Windows 7 by a couple of percentage points. This is pretty obvious as both Windows 7 and Vista use the same kernel. Microsoft didn't develop a new kernel for Windows 7, rather they have refined the Windows Vista kernel to use in Win 7. However, Windows 7 took less than half the time when compared with Windows vista.

So, the deciding factor to choose between the two should not be only performance but other enhancements that we see in Windows 7. You will read about those enhancements throughout this story.

The Old machine test
While Vista and Windows 7 performed almost same or for that matter, Vista was slightly better, we decided to try this test on an old P 4 machine. While Windows 7 performed good on Atom based machines, we thought it would also outperform Windows Vista on an old machine like P 4. We arranged an old P 4 box with 1GB RAM first tried installing Windows Vista on it. The installation was successful and took around within 27 minutes. Then we tried running the same Geekbench benchmark on it, but this time on 32-bit as P 4 has a 32-bit architecture only, we got an overall score of 497.

We then installed Windows 7 on the same box. The installation took around 26 minutes, which is time as taken by Windows Vista. We then ran Geekbench on it and this time, we got an overall score of 566 which is 10% higher. The overall use experience was also good as the mouse hover and over effect worked pretty well on the same system. One very interesting thing we noticed was that on the same machine a fresh install of Windows Vista at an ideal state consumed around 335MB of RAM from a pool of 1GB where as Windows 7 used only 285MB RAM, giving some free space for applications to run smoothly.