Is windows vista or xp better

Decision : Change, for change's sake, is never a good idea. And while you can understand Microsoft's desire to refresh the Windows UI all those Mac OS X screen shots look so much prettier than XP , Vista's designers seem to have cut off their nose to spite their face.

Regardless, the usability "improvements" in Vista are unlikely to make IT's list of compelling reasons to move away from XP anytime soon. Round 5: Performance Windows Vista is a bloated pig of an operating system. In fact, compared to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3, Vista requires roughly twice the hardware resources to deliver comparable performance.

Even stripped to the bone, with every new UI enhancement turned off and every new background service disabled, Vista is a good 40 percent slower than XP at a variety of business productivity tasks.

The above is no generalization. I've run the tests repeatedly. I have the hard numbers. You can see the full range of my results at exo. Think of users with torches lining up outside your datacenter. It's not a pretty picture.

So just wait for the next hardware upgrade cycle and hit them with Vista then, right? But consider this: For every CPU cycle wasted bringing Vista's bloated image on par with XP's, you could be providing your users with an actual performance increase across their core applications. If there were some compelling reason to run Vista over XP — a quantum leap in usability or manageability — I could see why the investment might be worth it.

But upgrading hardware just to maintain the status quo seems silly. Decision : Would you rather throw new hardware cycles at offsetting Microsoft's code bloat and voracious appetite for CPU bandwidth, or at a tangible, measurable improvement in application throughput and user productivity?

Enough said. Round 6: Hardware compatibility There's no question that hardware compatibility was initially a sore spot with Vista. This was particularly true for mobile users who had to suffer through a variety of functional and operational problems as they waited for updated device drivers.

And some of us are still waiting: I, for one, have yet to find a feature-complete video driver for my Dell XPS M, and I consider myself to be a fairly resourceful fellow. But beyond scarcity, there is the issue of revalidation. Most sane IT shops have implemented strict rules regarding what is and is not an accepted hardware configuration. Departments with names like "PC Engineering" spend copious time testing and certifying specific component combinations, isolating problem configurations, and feeding the necessary troubleshooting guidelines to their help desks.

A migration to Vista means repeating these steps, and then some, while the immaturity of the Vista driver base will have IT racing against a moving target. Windows XP, by contrast, has a mature and well-vetted compatibility base, with broad support from virtually every manufacturer.

And while Vista will almost certainly catch up in time, as things stand right now, every new device insertion is a bit of a crapshoot. Just the other day I was puzzled when my Vista-equipped notebook wouldn't recognize a generic HP LaserJet printer. Decision : When's the last time you worried about driver support under Windows XP? With an installed base into the hundreds of millions, chances are you'll still be finding XP drivers long after Vista's grandchildren are being put out to pasture.

Round 7: Microsoft software compatibility It's a truism in Windows circles: The Microsoft Office team charts its own course. As the drivers behind the company's longest-lived cash cow, the Office folks have the luxury of being able to ignore the hemming and hawing of the Windows team and to choose to support whatever platforms make business sense.

In the case of Office , this meant eschewing any exclusive tie-ins to the perennially delayed Vista. It's a similar story with Microsoft's BackOffice product line. As the gatekeeper to many of these resources, Microsoft Office often serves to level the playing field. What about future versions? There's no doubt that, eventually, Microsoft may try to target Vista exclusively.

However, finding features and functions that Vista supports and XP doesn't is not as easy as it sounds. Remember, much of Vista's "newness" is only skin deep.

In fact, outside of DirectX 10 — which is exclusively a Vista technology — there's no valid reason for excluding XP from the supported platforms list of any new application. Of course, this may change come Windows 7, the feature set of which is still very much in flux.

However, nobody's arguing that you should stick with XP forever — just that you can stick with it for now and potentially skip a Windows generation without incurring any real pain. Decision : Windows XP is still, and likely will remain for some time, the compatibility bar for new Microsoft applications. If and when Microsoft attempts to create an exclusive Vista tie-in, the company will need to articulate some valid technical reason — one that stands up to scrutiny from the IT community — for not supporting Windows XP.

Round 8: Third-party software compatibility When Microsoft first started marketing its next-generation desktop OS project Vista , it trumpeted a number of foundational technologies that were destined to usher in the next wave of killer applications.

Some, including WinFS, fell by the wayside. Others, including Windows Presentation Foundation WPF — which was quickly back-ported to Windows XP when developers balked at the idea of Vista exclusivity — have proven to be nothing more than the extensions to the. Net Framework. In fact, when Microsoft made these pronouncements, those of us "in the know" software developers and programmers familiar with the intricacies of. Net coding had a good laugh. Nobody in their right minds would produce any complex piece of traditional, fat client software using the sluggish, bug-ridden.

Net Framework, let alone a set of even buggier and less proven extensions. A year later and you'd be hard-pressed to name a single commercial WPF application. This includes upgrading from one release of Windows 10 to later release of Windows Migrating from one edition of Windows 10 to a different edition of the same release is also supported. Despite all the extra features in Windows 10, Windows 7 still has better app compatibility.

There's also the hardware element, as Windows 7 runs better on older hardware, which the resource-heavy Windows 10 might struggle with.

In fact, it was almost impossible to find a new Windows 7 laptop in You cannot do an in-place upgrade from Vista to Windows 10, and therefore Microsoft did not offer Vista users a free upgrade.

However, you can certainly buy an upgrade to Windows 10 and do a clean installation. You can install Windows 10 first and then go to the online Windows Store to pay for it.

Microsoft allows anyone to download Windows 10 for free and install it without a product key. And you can even pay to upgrade to a licensed copy of Windows 10 after you install it. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

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Is Vista older than Windows 7? Is Vista still supported? Which Windows is faster? What made Windows Vista so bad? To make life easy for you, we've split our findings over eight categories, with an overall verdict at the end. It's often said that recent versions of Windows have become bloated, and it's hardly unreasonable to expect each new OS to perform better than its previous iteration.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that the lightweight OS runs quickly on today's processors. Newer OSes can optimise for modern hardware and include more powerful features, but is this extra functionality really just slowing us down?

To find out, we decided to test each operating system's performance on an average PC. We installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 in that order all bit versions on the machine's GB hard drive and ran a number of real-world benchmarks to find out which OS was best.

The boot time test provided no surprises — Vista took the longest time to get started, XP came in second place and Windows 7 was the fastest. We bear good news. Even the beta of Windows 7 can beat Vista's sluggish start. At first it seemed like our file transfer benchmarks would deliver the same results.

Vista produced poor copy speeds in our small file tests, XP again placed second and Windows 7 came out on top. Both were beaten by the speedy Windows 7, though. This proved true for our application tests as well.