Vista Performance Shootout: Upgrade Vs. Clean Installation

Category Soft, Vista | Permalink | 14. March 2007

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Windows Vista’s been out for a few days, and people all over the Internet are alternately singing its praises and berating all who even dream of installing it; you could probably spend a sleepless month reading the content that’s been coughed up by major publishers, not to mention that of armies of bloggers and message board posters.

In a recent article, we kicked around the idea of dropping a Vista upgrade over an existing Windows XP installation. Windows Vista’s Setup program—the multitude of code that installs the operating system—doesn’t copy files and wriggle the new operating system atop the old one, resulting in a mishmash of both, as was more or less the case with prior Microsoft OSes. Vista’s compartmentalized installation routine actually copies an image of Vista onto the hard drive and then plows through things like hardware detection and configuration.

That means, at least in theory, a system upgraded from XP to Vista shouldn’t end up as bloated and sluggish as a PC upgrade from, say, Windows 98 to Windows XP (notwithstanding the bloat that Vista may or may not come with, depending on your opinion of the new Windows). Could that be true? Has Microsoft invented an upgrade process that doesn’t hopelessly clog your system’s arteries with virtual cholesterol?

To find out, we chose an innocent system that’s led an unassuming life as the main machine belonging to a former freelance journalist, a part-time game reviewer. Then we pretty much beat it over the head with Windows Vista Ultimate. In the process, we took a chunky batch of performance tests to see how the computer reacted to a Vista upgrade, and compared that to its experience with a fresh Vista installation.

Not surprisingly, there was quite a bit to think about in terms of emerging at the end of the perf tests with fair results. Here’s what we decided.
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Source :

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2089954,00.asp

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