Linux is the best best performing operating system for personal use.

Disk space used immediately after a fresh install. Measured in gigabytes; less is better. While some people might complain that the test used the Ultimate editions of both Vista and Windows 7, they probably forget that the standard Ubuntu includes software such as an office suite as standard. NB: Vista failed to detect the network card during install, leaving us without an internet connection until a driver was downloaded on another computer. Bootup and shutdown Boot up time was also measured from the moment the machine was turned on, and the timer was stopped as soon as the desktop was reached. The Dell box does take about 20 seconds to get past POST, but to avoid questions about when to start the timer it was just started as soon as the power button was pressed. Amount of time taken to boot, from machine being turned on to working desktop. Measured in seconds; less is better. The 32-bit version of Windows 7 is the only one to beat the one-minute mark, but that advantage is quickly lost in the switch to 64-bit. Ubuntu has always been rather slow to boot, but as we understand it reducing boot time is one of the goals of the Ubuntu 9.04 release and other distributions are much faster to boot. Amount of time taken to shutdown, from button being clicked to machine powering off. Measured in seconds; less is better. Windows lags a little behind Ubuntu, with 64-bit again proving a sticking point - this time for Windows Vista. IO testing To test filesystem performance, four tests were ran: copying large files from USB to HD, copying large files from HD to HD, copying small files from USB to HD, and copying small files from HD to HD. The HD to HD tests copied data from one part of the disk to another as opposed to copying to a different disk. For reference, the large file test comprised 39 files in 1 folder, making 399MB in total; the small file test comprised 2,154 files in 127 folders, making 603MB in total. Each of these tests were done with write caching disabled to ensure the full write had taken place. Amount of time taken to copy the small files from a USB flash drive to hard disk. Measured in seconds; less is better. Amount of time taken to copy the small files from one place to another on a single hard disk. Measured in seconds; less is better. Amount of time taken to copy the large files from a USB flash drive to hard disk. Measured in seconds; less is better. Amount of time taken to copy the large files from one place to another on a single hard disk. Measured in seconds; less is better. With the exception of Windows 7 while copying larges files around a hard drive, Windows generally suffered compared to Linux in all of these tests. Obviously Windows does have to worry about some things that Linux doesn't, namely DRM checks, but these figures show a drastic performance difference between the two. Notes: Vista and Windows 7 really seemed to struggle with copying lots of small files, but clearly it's something more than a dodgy driver because some of the large-file speeds are incredible in Windows 7. Both Vista and Windows 7 seemed to introduce random delays when deleting files. For example, about one in three times when deleting the files from our filesystem benchmark, this screen below would appear and do nothing for 25-30 seconds before suddenly springing into action and deleting the files. However, this wasn't part of our benchmark, so isn't included in the numbers above. This was very annoying. Richards benchmark Notes: This was done using the cross-platform Python port of Richards. For reference, Ubuntu 8.10 uses Python 2.5.2, Ubuntu 9.04 uses Python 2.5.4, and we used Python 2.5.4 on the Windows tests. Even though the 64-bit results for Linux and Windows don't look that far apart, we have to admit to being very impressed with the Windows tests - the deviation between tests was just 3ms on Vista, and 5ms on Windows 7, compared to 20ms on Linux. Amount of time taken to execute the Python Richards benchmark. Measured in milliseconds; less is better. It's clear from that graph that having a 64-bit OS can make a real difference in compute-intensive tasks, but it's not too pleasing to see Windows pip Linux to the post in nearly all results. Switching to ext4 All the Linux benchmarks above were done using ext3, so what happens when we switch to ext4? Well, not a lot: Boot, shutdown and filesystem tests for Ubuntu 9.04/x86-64 using ext3 (blue) and ext4 (red). Measured in seconds; less is better. Although there's no difference in shutdown speed, the boot time using ext4 dropped by 8 seconds, which is a fair improvement. We can probably discount the the USB to HD tests simply out of error margin, which leaves the HD to HD tests, and there we find a very healthy boost: 3.7 seconds were shaved off the small files test, making ext4 about 25% faster. Our tests also showed an improvement in the large file test, but it's not as marked. Conclusions Benchmarks are always plagued with questions, uncertainties, error margins and other complexities, which is why we're not going to try to look too deeply into these figures. Obviously we're Linux users ourselves, but our tests have shown that there are some places where Windows 7 really is making some improvement and that's good for competition in the long term. However, Linux isn't sitting stil.