Windows compared Windows 7 vs Vista vs XPUpdate now read our full Windows 7 review. Buying a Windows OS used to be so simple. A new version appeared, most people agreed it was better than the last one and youd get a copy for your next PC. Free Windows Xp Themes are always what people look to download. Few best desktop theme for window xp are available which you can download and apply using Style XP. Vista Theme For Xp Windows' title='Vista Theme For Xp Windows' />PC customization Community to share, upload and download XP Themes, Windows 7 Themes, Wallpapers, Visual Styles, Boot Screens and Login Screens. Updated Daily. Tell me about the issue and Ill help you find the solution you need. Job done. But Windows Vista changed all that. Despite many years of availability, Vistas poor reception means that computer manufacturers are still selling new systems with XP. Its also common for laptops to be downgraded from Vista to XP, with battery life reportedly improving as a result. Deciding which operating system is best for you has become decidedly trickier, then, and the arrival of Windows 7 only complicates things further. Is the newcomer just Vista with a facelift Or has Microsoft learned from its mistakes and delivered a product that will restore its battered reputation Perhaps you should forget about Vista and Windows 7 altogether, opting for the mature XP instead The choice might be easy. If you have old or extremely basic hardware, for instance, then XP will have a definite advantage its relatively lightweight core means the operating system can theoretically run with only 6. MB of RAM, so therell be plenty of resources left over for your applications. However, if you have high end requirements, such as using a powerful PC to run heavy duty applications, Vista and Windows 7 come into their own. Theyre better optimised for multicore CPUs, and Windows 7 in particular includes a number of tweaks to make the best of the latest hardware. You may well find yourself somewhere between these two extremes, though, and so the best OS to use will be a more difficult decision. But dont worry help is at hand. Multi Extractor Full Version. Weve taken a test PC and laptop, installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 on them and applied a number of testing real life benchmarks to see which will come out on top. Were aware that speed isnt everything, though, so weve also explored the new features that each OS has introduced. To make life easy for you, weve split our findings over eight categories, with an overall verdict at the end. So which is best Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 Read on to find out what weve uncovered. Performance Its often said that recent versions of Windows have become bloated, and its hardly unreasonable to expect each new OS to perform better than its previous iteration. However, when Windows XP first appeared back in 2. MHz Pentium II CPUs with a mere 1. MB of RAM. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the lightweight OS runs quickly on todays processors. Newer OSes can optimise for modern hardware and include more powerful features, but is this extra functionality really just slowing us down To find out, we decided to test each operating systems performance on an average PC. The system is nothing particularly special by todays standards, consisting of an Intel dual core E5. CPU, 2. GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD4. We installed XP, Vista and Windows 7 in that order all 3. GB hard drive and ran a number of real world benchmarks to find out which OS was best. The boot time test provided no surprises Vista took the longest time to get started, XP came in second place and Windows 7 was the fastest. SWITCHED ON Tired of lengthy boot times We bear good news. Even the beta of Windows 7 can beat Vistas sluggish start. At first it seemed like our file transfer benchmarks would deliver the same results. Vista produced poor copy speeds in our small file tests, XP again placed second and Windows 7 came out on top. But when we tried transferring larger 1. GB files, Vista surprisingly just managed to win out over XP. Both were beaten by the speedy Windows 7, though. This proved true for our application tests as well. Open a small Excel spreadsheet or PDF file, say, and XP beats Vista, but heavy duty spreadsheets and PDF files opened faster under Vista than XP. Once again, however, both were trounced by the newcomer. You might have spotted the theme here. Windows 7 delivered excellent results, beating or coming close to the performance of the lightweight XP in just about every category. Its quite remarkable given that this is an operating system still in beta. When all the drivers are fully finished, we should see even better performance. If wed run the benchmarks on a less powerful PC, perhaps one with only 1. GB of RAM, then its possible that Windows XP would have fared better than it did here. But for even a fairly basic modern PC, Windows 7 delivers the best performance around. Scores. XP 3. 5 5. Vista 3 5. Windows 7 4.