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Windows XP faster than Leopard?

S

SethBoy

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 23, 2007
219
635
Okay I know this is about Windows, but I think I'll post it under the Mac OS X forum as the trouble I have is that I think my Leopard side of things is slower than my Windows side.

I recently had XP installed via Boot Camp on my MBP, and it seems to me that XP just does things pretty quickly. Firefox and MSN messenger launches very quickly and are very snappy. It also takes little to no time for XP to be responsive as it enters the desktop.

On the other hand, it takes quite a bit of time for Leopard to be usable as the desktop loads. The dock comes up, the toolbar takes a while to load, and the Airport, Volume, Date/Time etc icons take some more time to completely load. Then, when I launch OS X's equivalent of IM and browser apps (Adium and Firefox), they take some time to open, especially Firefox which can bounce for more than 8 times before launching.

I'm just wondering if XP is just snappier because it is more lightweight than Leopard? Or is it an anomaly and there are ways for me to speed up Leopard? Of course, I think that the fact that my Leopard partition dates back to about 3 years ago compared to a relatively fresh install of Windows will affect things, but the speed difference is very significant.

Also, OS X is set to the wrong time when I return to it from Windows, and it takes a good minute before it automatically adjusts itself, while Windows is always the right time. My Apple Wireless Keyboard is also usable from the get go in Windows, while it takes very long for OS X to start to use it.

Any thoughts?
 
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.
 
Sorkvild said:
First of all, what are the specs of both machines? Therein may lie your answer. ;)
Click to expand...

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.
 
SethBoy said:
Okay I know this is about Windows, but I think I'll post it under the Mac OS X forum as the trouble I have is that I think my Leopard side of things is slower than my Windows side.

I recently had XP installed via Boot Camp on my MBP, and it seems to me that XP just does things pretty quickly. Firefox and MSN messenger launches very quickly and are very snappy. It also takes little to no time for XP to be responsive as it enters the desktop.

On the other hand, it takes quite a bit of time for Leopard to be usable as the desktop loads. The dock comes up, the toolbar takes a while to load, and the Airport, Volume, Date/Time etc icons take some more time to completely load. Then, when I launch OS X's equivalent of IM and browser apps (Adium and Firefox), they take some time to open, especially Firefox which can bounce for more than 8 times before launching.

I'm just wondering if XP is just snappier because it is more lightweight than Leopard? Or is it an anomaly and there are ways for me to speed up Leopard? Of course, I think that the fact that my Leopard partition dates back to about 3 years ago compared to a relatively fresh install of Windows will affect things, but the speed difference is very significant.

Also, OS X is set to the wrong time when I return to it from Windows, and it takes a good minute before it automatically adjusts itself, while Windows is always the right time. My Apple Wireless Keyboard is also usable from the get go in Windows, while it takes very long for OS X to start to use it.

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

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.
 
nick9191 said:
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.
Click to expand...

I find that disappointing actually. XP may be an old OS, but if that makes it faster, I don't see how that is a bad thing. For intents such as instant messaging and web browsing, if it's snappier than OS X then I'm really quite disappointed. Besides, it comes with the added bonus of better gaming capabilities.

plinden said:
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.
Click to expand...

No, I don't have any start up items.

Consultant said:
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.
Click to expand...

How do torrents affect the speed?


Well then, since I still like OS X and just about everything Apple, how do I go about optimizing the speed of Leopard? I have recently defragged, and resetted the PRAM, but it does not seem to help the speed much.
 
Excessive torrenting fragments the drive and free space in any os.

Seriously in a few months Leopard will be faster than xp.
 
SethBoy said:
Well then, since I still like OS X and just about everything Apple, how do I go about optimizing the speed of Leopard? I have recently defragged, and resetted the PRAM, but it does not seem to help the speed much.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Watabou said:
Forgive me for being stupid, but how do torrents fragment the drive? And I thought Mac OS X regualary defragments or something?
Click to expand...

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.
 
Watabou said:
Forgive me for being stupid, but how do torrents fragment the drive? And I thought Mac OS X regualary defragments or something?
Click to expand...
dXTC said:
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.
Click to expand...


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
If your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files (such as editing video, but see the Tip below if you use iMovie and Mac OS X 10.3), there's a chance the disks could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities.
Click to expand...
 
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.
 
SethBoy said:
I find that disappointing actually. XP may be an old OS, but if that makes it faster, I don't see how that is a bad thing. For intents such as instant messaging and web browsing, if it's snappier than OS X then I'm really quite disappointed. Besides, it comes with the added bonus of better gaming capabilities.
Click to expand...

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.
 
shadownddust said:
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.
Click to expand...

That might be Spotlight. If you don't need it to index your Windows partition, exclude it.
 
reclusivemonkey said:
<pedant mode="on">
Adium and Firefox are NOT OS X's equivalent apps. They would be iChat and Safari.
<pedant mode="off">
Click to expand...

Okay, OS X's equivalent of MSN Messenger (Microsoft's OS X version is quite crappy) and Firefox. Nobody uses iChat where I'm from, and Safari's beach balls get very tiring after a while. Besides, I love Firefox's address bar.


nout72 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Yeah I only put my Mac to sleep, but I guess because of Boot Camp I have to reboot OS X after finishing with Windows.

mkrishnan said:
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.
Click to expand...

Any tutorials on how to do such a thing?

I should probably wait for Snow Leopard. Perhaps that is the answer.
 
mkrishnan said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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