Fastest OS

[compass]

which is the fastest Operating System ?

[dirtwarrior]

like jeremy was saying a properly nlited xp home is sufficient for most needs

[EchoNoise]

Windows 98 all the way

But yeah, an n-lited OS is pretty **** fast ^_^

[Martin Zugec]

It depends For me fastest OS is Windows XP, because for me "fast OS" means easy (that means fast) to manage

But fastest OS in your meaning is XPE for me

[InTheWayBoy]

2000...all of XP's tech and none of the fluff.

[boooggy]

nlited xp... B)

[raskren]

Xp Pro for me. Reason being, Xp runs the latest hardware. Dual-core, hyper-threading, etc.

If you mean the OS with the least overhead (I don't see DOS 6.22 or Win 95) well then that would be the oldest OS. Not exactly a meaningful evaluation.

Edited August 26, 2005 by raskren

[fdv]

i agree with raskren insofar as his point about hardware, it's probably xp. very nlite'd.

i think a requirement should be that you've used all of the major types before voting

(i.e. 98, me, xp, 2k, and 2k3, but not necessarily xp home versus xp pro)

i'd love to see some benchmarks... i have all three but i really don't want to clean off a machine and virtual pc's are a bad comparison... anyone wanna nlite 2k, xp and 2k3 and do some benchmarking?

[dirtwarrior]

fdv this is a good idea. Nlite all 3 bench mark and do a comparo. Maybe even how small all 3 can be also. I just have xp so this leaves me out.

[At0mic]

A bit of a meaningless topic really. Are we talking about the fastest OS on today’s hardware or the fastest OS on the hardware that was around when each OS came out? If you’re talking today’s hardware, then XP is the fastest for a workstation or 2003 for a server. If however, you used a machine from 1998/1999, then Windows 98 would be the fastest because XP would be slow as s***. Mainly because most machines at that time had around 64Mb ram. Or towards the end of 1999 you’re stepping towards 128 Mb territory so Windows 2000 would be the better choice. You could compare a 1998 machine running win98 with a 2001 machine running winxp but then it wouldn't be fare because you would have to compare equivalent applications.

If the question was what is the fastest OS on today’s hardware regardless of what you can do with it, then the answer would be MS-DOS 1.0 as it would load almost instantly. An improvement of considerable magnitude when compared to the IBM Datamaster with its 8086 processor and 64K ram which made its debut with MS-DOS 1.0

[InTheWayBoy]

The other thing to take into account is the reliability and stability of the system. An nlited system, while very customized, is also very problematic in different scenarios.

Before the flames come, I know it can be polished very nicely, but the sad fact is that it takes many many trials to finally get a tweaked version...and that's only for one specific configuration. In other words, for a consumer it's not bad, but in a corporate or production environment you probably would just opt for the vanilla install.

I would like to see a benchmark of the three previously mentioned systems...yet I suggest also throwing in a comparison of a vanilla install vs. an nlite install. They we could begin to see if the time and effort of nlite is truely beneficial in the long run.

I could conduct some benchmarks, but I currently have my personal computer at work, so it would be a while.

[raskren]

The other thing to take into account is the reliability and stability of the system. An nlited system, while very customized, is also very problematic in different scenarios.

Before the flames come, I know it can be polished very nicely, but the sad fact is that it takes many many trials to finally get a tweaked version...and that's only for one specific configuration. In other words, for a consumer it's not bad, but in a corporate or production environment you probably would just opt for the vanilla install.

I would like to see a benchmark of the three previously mentioned systems...yet I suggest also throwing in a comparison of a vanilla install vs. an nlite install. They we could begin to see if the time and effort of nlite is truely beneficial in the long run.

I could conduct some benchmarks, but I currently have my personal computer at work, so it would be a while.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The problem with a benchmark is it is going to be predominately hardware based. Read: it will stress the hardware, not the software. Any variance amongst the scores would all fall well within the margin of error for the test leaving us with inconclusive results. To further remove hardware from the list of variables the test would have to be run on bleeding-edge hardware: Dual-core CPU, 4GB RAM, SCSI hard drives in a RAID0 configuration, and possibly frozen and overclocked. We could probably remove the hard drive as a variable entirely by loading the operating system onto an iRam device. But with this hardware how do we test DOS? Windows 3.x? 95, 98, Me? We can't and that doesn't make for a good test or conclusive results.

The "fluff" in Xp that many purists hate consumes memory and little else. Throw enough ram at Xp and it will run AS FAST as Windows 2000. When you add small kernel improvements like prefetching you might find Xp faster than 2000 when including application launch and system bootup into the results, contrary to popular belief.

2000 doesn't require as much ram as Xp. In a low memory environment an Xp box might be continuously paging to disk while the 2000 machine processes along happily. This is a scenario where an older OS is faster but probably doesn't answer the original poster's question.

[Gurgelmeyer]

Nothing quite like DOS 5 / Win 3.1 on a 2.4GHz P4

Voted "Me" - that's the fastest out-of-the-box 32-bit OS (well almost 32-bit) I've tried yet. Too bad it was so buggy - I'll just stick with W2K and nLite

Edited August 28, 2005 by Gurgelmeyer