Windows Vista and Windows XP deliver equal performance on a set of common business tacks, with little exceptions. Microsoft revealed that it has commissioned a study to Principled Technologies to compare the responsiveness levels of Vista and XP. Principled Technologies developed, ran, and documented the results of the tests comparing the performances of the two operating systems under the same criteria. The main conclusions were summarized into three key findings:

"Windows Vista was noticeably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP on several common business operations."

"Overall, Windows Vista and Windows XP were roughly equally responsive on most test operations. Windows Vista was more responsive on some operations, and on those operations on which it was more responsive, Windows XP typically responded only a half a second or so faster."

"Windows Vista Aero had little effect on the responsiveness of Windows Vista. Over 95 percent of the response-time differences between tests we ran with and without Vista Aero were under a tenth of a second, and all of the differences were under one second."

"Superfetch is the key driver behind" Vista's performances following a restart. "I want to point out, though, that 'after rebooting' can be seen as a proxy for lots of cold operations. Rebooting is just the easiest to reliably measure," explained Matt Ayers, a Program Manager with the Client Performance Team.

Ayers additionally revealed that the Windows Performance Team is content with the overall performance results, even though they are pointing to an equality between Vista and XP. However, he does specify that Vista delivers additional out of the box capabilities: the user account control, Windows Defender, search indexing, etc. I, however fail to see the relevance of this argument. Windows Vista does deliver added functionality, but that functionality is powered by hardware resources that are by far superior to the configuration necessary to run Windows XP. The actual issue here is that Windows XP is not experiencing a boost in performance on Vista capable systems, indicating poor resource management.

"One of the most interesting bits for me was their 3rd highlight... you can run Aero without guilt! We put quite a bit of effort into making sure that the new visuals were as efficient as possible and it really paid off," added Ayers.