OS X slower than Windows

[ITR 81]

Hell when I compared Xp to OS X and my friends did they said OS X is alot faster then XP and they had new Dell LP.
The only reason OS X slows down is because the OS eats up memory.

But I would never get Xp because it's just not good OS. W2K is still better IMO. When I worked in the mil. new Dell Xp Pro machines crashed atleast once a week. To me it was just headache.

 

[bousozoku]

Fukui:

It's hard to believe that Microsoft's compiler is better than anyone else's but gcc is such a mess, it's surprising that it (they) generates code every time.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention this, but with Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel because the graphics performance was so incredibly slow. At that point in time, it meant that most any graphical glitch crashed the system, but has apparently be resolved somewhat. I have my doubts as to whether Microsoft would have gone for stability and moved the graphics subsystem out of the kernel.

Foxer:

I had one of the HP models running at 1.8. With 1.25 GB of RAM, I still had to turn off all the sliding animations just to be able to use the machine.

 

[leet1]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Foxer:

I had one of the HP models running at 1.8. With 1.25 GB of RAM, I still had to turn off all the sliding animations just to be able to use the machine. [/B]

Sorry, but I find it hard to believe<not saying your lieing> but my old 1ghz athlon pc running xp pro with 512megs runs xp with all the effects just fine.....Maybe my desktop is just a fluke....How could it not be usable without turning off the sliding animation?

 

[AdamR01]

Anyone that says Windows XP runs slow on their new computer either has a bunch of OEM crap software installed or something is seriously hosed. Windows XP ran fine on my Celeron 600MHz and 384mb of Ram. I now have a 1GHz P3 and it runs about the same in the gui. I have friends with Celerons and as little as 128mb of ram and it runs decently. Its no speed demon, but its certainly not unusable and its just fine if you turn off some of the eye candy.

 

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by leet1
Sorry, but I find it hard to believe<not saying your lieing> but my old 1ghz athlon pc running xp pro with 512megs runs xp with all the effects just fine.....Maybe my desktop is just a fluke....How could it not be usable without turning off the sliding animation?

It was taking 5 - 15 seconds to display menus because of the animation. You probably had a nicer video card too, but HP and Compaq are selling business computers with ATI Rage 128 Pro cards. Even Apple has not sold those since the early G4s.

Try using WinXP when the start menu, the pull down menus, and the popup menus take a very long time to work.

 

[AdamR01]

My Celeron 600 had a Voodoo 3 PCI...

 

[leet1]

Originally posted by bousozoku
You probably had a nicer video card too, but HP and Compaq are selling business computers with ATI Rage 128 Pro cards.

TNT2 with 32 megs better? I don't know that card.

 

[AdamR01]

Originally posted by bousozoku
You probably had a nicer video card too, but HP and Compaq are selling business computers with ATI Rage 128 Pro cards.

I dont know of any companies that sell Rage 128s in new computers any more or that have in a long time. Most business computers would have integrated Intel graphics I would think.

 

[markjones05]

Originally posted by Foxer
My office has new (within six months) Compaqs with 1.8ghz p4's running XP professional. These things are soooo slow. Both my powerbook and powermac are faster, but so was my wife's eMac, running at 1ghz.

You have to remember that a 1ghz mac is roughly equal to a 2ghz pentium pc.

 

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by AdamR01
I dont know of any companies that sell Rage 128s in new computers any more or that have in a long time. Most business computers would have integrated Intel graphics I would think.

These were new machines in March 2003.

 

[AdamR01]

Really?? Thats interesting. I dont think Windows uses much hardware acceleration for the drawing though (not like quartz extreme anyways). I remember my Dad's HP with Windows 98 was slow as hell untill we ran msconfig and disabled a bunch of the crap that ran at start up.

 

[bousozoku]

I went to the HP website a little while ago and looked at PCs under small/medium business equipment.

They have machines there starting for $359 (I think it was) with onboard Intel video. The step up now has GeForce 4MX as the first option, so they've apparently gone away from the ATI boards since 8 months ago. Maybe that should clear out their complaint desk.

 

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Fukui:
I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention this, but with Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft moved the graphics subsystem into the kernel because the graphics performance was so incredibly slow.

Yea, I heard this, but wasn't sure.

 

[Powerbook G5]

In my experience, running 10.2.8/10.3.1 on my 1.25 GHz G4 has been a lot faster than running XP on the 2.8 GHz Dell at home.

 

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Fukui:

It's hard to believe that Microsoft's compiler is better than anyone else's but gcc is such a mess, it's surprising that it (they) generates code every time.

Well, I meant superior to GCC, not to every other one.

FWIW, my friend last year bought a 1599 Dell Laptop with 1.8 Ghz P4 and Geforce 2MX. When he tried to access the "All Programs" menu in the Start Menu and it took on average a two or three seconds to display, so VMMV! Not everyone has the exact same experience....

 

[AdamR01]

But everyone that said it was slow hasnt said if they had a bunch of oem crap running in the background. You arent going to have a good experience if you do. I work at a computer store and every time i work it seems like someone brought in their computer because it is slow. Then the stores charges $50 for me to run msconfig .

 

[Foxer]

Originally posted by bousozoku
Foxer:

I had one of the HP models running at 1.8. With 1.25 GB of RAM, I still had to turn off all the sliding animations just to be able to use the machine. [/B]

Yeah. There is a awful hang time when laucnching programs or bringing up the "start" menu. Maybe not 4-5 seconds, but very noticable. I'm sure, being an office situation, that our video cards are part of the problem.

Doesn't bother me, though. I just feel better about my Macs when I get home.

 

[lucab1982]

Re: It's slower. And prettier.

Originally posted by Flickta
Yes, X is slower than XP.
The problem is that Apple did not think about low-end users (My PB G4 800 for instance)

pbook 800 dvi, 1gb, 5400rpm hd.

Panther is way faster on my same powerbook.

Even a G4 cube at home is faster with panther rather than jaguar.

I was close to upgrading and waited till i installed panther and wow!

i'll be happy to pay the upgrade each year if the improvements are this good.

 

[bcharm]

Originally posted by Fukui
Well, some of things that you are noticing are part of a few problems.

1. The compiler that they are using is not really designed/optimized for the PowerPC chip, and even after a few years of work GCC (the compiler) is still problematic in terms of optimization. Expect this to be resolved with further revisions or a switch to XLC (IBM Compiler).

2. The windowing system in OS X is very advanced technically, but it also lags. It definitely needs to be worked on.

One of the things that makes XP so fast in the UI is that 1.They have a superior compiler, 2. GDI has been around for a long long time and is optimized to death.

3. They aren't really doing advanced compositing like anti-aliasing, interpolation, double-buffering, per-pixel transparency (most of which is being still done on the CPU in Jag/Panther). 4. I heard somewhere that XP uses the Graphics card to speed up text rendering.

Also remember that the BSD subsystem and Mach to an extent is very fast, its just the things that you end up seeing that are so slow. This IMO is one of the last things that Apple needs to do to finally hit every nail down that is still sticking up.

Also, if you are using MS Office, try deleting the "Microsoft Database Daemon" file in the Office folder. I found out it was on while using Office and pegged my CPU at 40%!!! Killing that things sped things up pretty well.

Thanks Fukui. That's exactly what I wanted to know. And thanks for the MS Office tip. I'll take a look on my sis's iBook when she comes back for Thanksgiving. =)

 

[Fukui]

Originally posted by bcharm
Thanks Fukui. That's exactly what I wanted to know. And thanks for the MS Office tip. I'll take a look on my sis's iBook when she comes back for Thanksgiving. =)

No problem.

That Database thing, really was what was slowing my G/F's iBook to death. I was using Word, and noticed immediately that everything started to crawl.So I used top and found out that there were two Microsoft PIDs running. So I killed the other one, and then trashed it. And then Boom, it was like a whole new laptop! Smooth scrolling was actually smooth now...

BTW, the daemon is used to scan your lan for other MS Office installations, I don't know why that requires 40-60% of my CPU???

 

[bousozoku]

That's almost funny.

I used to install MS Office 97 on various Windows PCs at one place where I worked. The installation included a complimentary (read compulsory) help application called fastfind.

This would slow down the whole system as it was constantly indexing the contents of the hard drive. We always deleted the shortcut from the startup folder just so that the systems didn't spend a large percentage of the processing power and disk speed on it.

Your MS Office Intellisense at work.

 

[Backtothemac]

Well, I just sold a 2.6GHZ Hyperthreaded PIV Dell. I am now on an iMac 500 MHZ G3. This thing has 320 MB Ram. The Dell had 256MB DDR 400. Panther feels faster than XP did. Especially in windows that have many files in them. Also, my start menu was huge. Even with a 256MB Video card, it would hang for about two seconds before the menu was visible.

Dock animation is smooth, so is genie on everything except iPhoto, and iTunes.

 

[leet1]

Backtothemac,

It had to be the settings. Theres a setting for delay of appearance of the menus.


Theres no reason for it to be slow on a system like that.

 

[Nermal]

My 800 MHz iBook with Jaguar felt faster than my dad's Athlon 1700. I've since paid my NZ$155 for Panther, and don't see much of a performance improvement, although it's still faster than the Athlon of course

 

[Backtothemac]

Originally posted by leet1
Backtothemac,

It had to be the settings. Theres a setting for delay of appearance of the menus.


Theres no reason for it to be slow on a system like that.

I had tweak XP running with no delay on the windows. I have seen it on some XP systems, and not on others.