I’ve often wondered just how bad Vista really is on system performance, so recently when I purchased a couple of Acer laptops I decided to install XP on one and leave Vista on the other for a few tests. Basically I’m just running Geekbench and a battery life test, nothing crazy.
For the battery test, I merely pointed the browser to a URL set to auto refresh every 30 seconds and disabled all power saving features.
Both computers are the follwing:
Model: Acer Aspire 4715Z Processor: 1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core RAM: 2GB RAM
[ Vista ]
First, I ran Geekbench. The system scored a moderate 1911, but of course the system shipped with a bunch of bloatware, so in the interest of fairness I removed all the pre-installed software and ran Geekbench again, it then scored 1922.
The battery life gave out after 1 hour and 45 minutes of doing nothing but browsing the internet, that’s pretty sad. [ XP ]
Running Geekbench on XP with no drivers installed, resulted in a score of 1939, only slightly higher than the Vista machine.
After installing all the drivers and re-running Geekbench I ended up with a much more statisfying score of 2168. Not as large of a difference as I expected, but still a noticeable improvement.
The battery life saw a huge jump though, ending with 3 hours and 14 minutes while browsing the internet.
I’ve been going back and forth and whether or not I should buy a UMPC. Now one could argue that I don’t need one, and they’d be right… but I can dream!
If I did buy one, I think I’d go with the Samsung Q1U-V. The base specs are decent for a UMPC (especially for its price of $799)… Intel Processor A110(800MHz), 7″ WSVGA screen, 1GB DDR2 400 RAM, 60GB 4200rpm hard drive, Intel GMA950 graphics card, and Windows Vista Home Premium (which I would replace with Windows XP Tablet Edition). Full specs are located after the jump.
In the end I opted not to purchase one, mainly because between my laptop and my iPhone I already have enough gadgets to cover my computing needs. Though I might reconsider getting a UMPC if the HTC Shift drops in price drastically.
