A few weeks back I wrote about The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 and boy did I hear some opinions!
“Why should I be forced to upgrade?! I’m happy with my 11 year old OS dammit!”
“I’m sick of Microsoft always changing things!”
“Get off my lawn ya damn kids!”
But most interestingly:
“Why should I be forced to upgrade my hardware to run this new OS?!”
Really? I mean I know there’s this unwritten law that newer software requires more resources but my experience with Windows 8 has always been that’s it’s way faster certainly than Windows 7 was on the same hardware, but it’s my recollection that XP was never really as snappy as 8 is now on any hardware. So I dug up the oldest, crustiest hardware I could get my hands on and did some tests:
If you just want to skip straight to the results, here’s the rundown:
Lenovo T60 (released in 2006)
1GB of 987 MHz RAM
1.83 GHz Intel core duo CPU
7,200 RPM mechanical drive
And the results:
| Windows 8 | Windows XP | |
| Installation |  24 min 55 sec | 26 min 12 sec |
| Boot |  6 sec | 17 sec |
| Open Word Doc |  3.4 sec | 4.3 sec |
| Open PDF doc | 3.4 sec |  2.8 sec |
| Load troyhunt.com in IE |  2.9 sec | 7.9 sec |
| Open Photoshop file |  16.5 sec | 41.5 sec |
| PassMark PerformanceTest |  407.5 | 356.5 |
Update, 16 Feb, 2012: Just some clarifications due to questions that came up: The both operating systems were installed via DVD, they were 32 bit and both were patched with 100% of critical or important items from Windows Update. They were also both running Microsoft Security Essentials and the other software seen in the demo (Office 2013 in Win 8 and Office 2003 in XP, Adobe reader and Photoshop CS3). The boot test was done by shutting down from each OS then powering on.