Windows XP faster than Leopard?

First of all, what are the specs of both machines? Therein may lie your answer.

Edit: Ooops I'm retarded, flew past the Bootcamp part. Yeah, not sure really.

 

Specs would be good except it's one machine not two. (see Boot Camp)

And actually mine is kinda the same. I'm on an 8 core MacPro and XP seems much more snappy....

 

Yes it is.

XP was released in 2001, Leopard was released in 2007.

You want to try running NT 4 on your Macbook Pro, boot up time is literally instant.

 

XP may be snappier at first but in my opinion Leopard stands the test of time. You will notice as the months, or sometimes depending on how much you use XP, that XP slows down and it is sometimes drastic. The true test of which is faster XP or Leopard is time... However, XP runs so much better on a Mac anyway....

 

New install of any OS = usable
Wait a few months and windows would slowed down a lot more than leoapard.

Do you torrent in OSX? If yes, that's your problem.
If you install Leopard on a new disk with no apps installed it'll be faster than xp.

 

If you have lots of items in /System/Library/StartupItems and your login items, it'll slow down logins.

My work Dell and home iMac are about the same age and roughly equivalent is specs, and it takes the Dell several minutes to boot (I reboot it maybe once a month so never bothered trying to find out why it's so slow ... of course, it hasn't been reinstalled for over three years, so that's a factor), while I can get on the Mac in less than a minute even with several Login Items.

 

Excessive torrenting fragments the drive and free space in any os.

Seriously in a few months Leopard will be faster than xp.

 

You can have a look at Activity Monitor, see what's running.
Some processes are running without knowing they actually are.
If you for instance see GoogleUpdater, GoogleDesktopagent running in Activity Monitor you definitely have to stop them.
Make sure you manually delete those files.

Another thing that will speed things up is NOT shutting you iMac off too often, preferably NEVER shut it off.
Just keep it running and things will work more smoothly, you'll notice FireFox will take far fewer bounces in the Dock before it starts.

 

Firefox is a lot bulkier on the Mac than Windows. Apps appear to load really fast on XP, but to actually get to use all features takes time in many XP apps that are launched for the first time. Mac OS X and XP are two totally different OSes, they work very differently.

XP (Windows in general) also tricks you into thinking an application is "launched" instantly with a window that pops open immediately after clicking on an icon or file. In fact the app was probably already running and merely showed a new window. Internet Explorer and MS Office apps all do this. If you open MS Outlook, Word is running as it provides the mail composition features so opening a word document seems instantaneous because Word was already running, just with no visible windows.

Adium is fairly complex, if it takes a long time to startup then the app's design needs to be reworked It's really amusing reading "optimizing" tips from Cocoa developers that amount to using something other than Cocoa to do stuff faster than with Cocoa.

 

<pedant mode="on">
Adium and Firefox are NOT OS X's equivalent apps. They would be iChat and Safari.
<pedant mode="off">

 

Forgive me for being stupid, but how do torrents fragment the drive? And I thought Mac OS X regualary defragments or something?

 

By their very nature, torrents are very fragmented; files distributed via torrents are sent to you in literal fragments. The OS (whether Windows or OS X) temporarily saves these fragments in their own sectors on the disk, not necessarily contiguously. When a torrent is finished, the torrent application may then move the completed fragments to contiguous files. However, that still leaves a LOT of holes behind, and these increase over time.

From what I understand, OS X does not defragment, as Unix is normally better than Windows's file systems about fragmentation slowing down the file system. I could be wrong though; feel free to correct me, anyone.

 

OSX defrags, but only for files under certain sizes.

OSX is better than windows under normal circumstances. But if you are running things that slows it down, it doesn't matter what OS you are running.

Note that Apple states most users do not need to defragment
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375?viewlocale=en_US

However, problem with torrent are similar to this

 

A fresh installation of XP is the snappiest OS I have ever come around. Startup time and application launching are incredibly fast also on relatively old computers with a minimal amount (512M) of memory.

But it ages very quickly.

 

This really depends on how you define "faster" and what you need from your system. A basic example is looking at searching for an e-mail in Outlook on WinXP and searching for an e-mail in Mail on Tiger or Leopard, which use Spotlight, a core OS X technology. Searching for e-mail on Outlook (I haven't used 2007 yet) in Windows is well nigh uselessly slow.

If you strip down Tiger or Leopard by removing some of these services after deciding you don't need them, it's actually quite fast. Much like XP becomes even faster if you turn off the XP theme and go for the classic theme.

 

Yea I noticed the same thing when I installed XP on my macbook, but I agree, over the course of time, all of my pc's in the past have eventually slowed down, and with almost nothing running when I start the XP side of things, faster boots are what I would expect.

I did notice, however, that once I try to boot back into OS X, it takes longer than normal for the comp to "get it's bearings". Starting from an OS X shutdown takes maybe a minute to get back to OS X, but after restarting from XP, closer to 2-3.

 

That might be Spotlight. If you don't need it to index your Windows partition, exclude it.

 

Definitely, you can't compare XP and OS X in this way. OS X is a much more advanced OS. You trade a little UI speed for services and background maintenance. Right now, for example, I have 71 services running, and I only booted up this morning. Does this slow down the OS a little? Sure. However, this gives me a constantly running KeyChain, iCal services, iLife library, system wide dictionary/spell check, various background updaters, various menu items and custom startup items, Spotlight constantly and instantly indexing, etc. All this translates into a much better OS experience. XP becomes a major pain in the ass if you start adding comparable features to it. Sure you can keep it lean and mean, but who wants a OS like that? Maybe only for work.

MS tried to emulate the undeniably good experience of OS X with Vista, but it turned out all wrong. They hid all the useful, albeit non-intuitive, stuff from XP and painted it over with a bulky and ugly UI that constantly bugs you with in your face reminders and questions. Vista is like the unholy reincarnation of Clippy from pre-2007 MS Office.

 

There are... I don't particularly recommend them, but they exist...


Disabling spotlight

Disabling Dashboard

Set your number of spaces to just one / turn it off, etc.

 

i noticed the same thing, XP is faster when loaded. although it takes a few minutes to actually get to the desktop.

although i'd rather wait the few seconds for OS X's obvious advanced features and security over XP's gay interface and lack of functionality.