Windows XP versus Windows Vista
Windows XP vs Windows VistaShort comparison of Windows XP versus Windows Vista:
The comparison has been made on optimally tweaked machines just after system boot, with no applications running:
Let's take a look at processes. At first glance it looks like Vista has less processes, but...
... but Windows Vista by default shows only processes from current user. You can click "Show processes from all users" button to see all processes in the system - there are naturally more of them than on XP, which results in more resources being used by the OS.
Windows vista has also an additional "Services" tab. There is really a lot of services running on Vista.
Actually Windows Vista can eat up few percent of your CPU power even when "doing nothing". It also consumes significantly more system memory (see below).
Memory usage by Windows Vista is about 4 times larger than it is in case of Windows XP! This monster consumes such significant amount of RAM by itself it might become a serious issue when running resource demanding applications, even on machines with large ammount of RAM. Compare for yourself:
Operating systems compared:
Bonus - Windows XP registry editor vs Windows Vista registry editor:
