Comments on: New Tests: Latest Macs Prove Faster than Vista Notebooks

By: Mac user

Mac user — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:38:26 +0000

I’m running OS X and Windows 7 on my PC atm. And I can tell that OS X is MUCH faster than windows. It’s booting in about 15 sec while windows needs more than 30. And after these 30 secs windows also needs to load all the programms etc. OS X works right after the boot, that’s what I like a lot about osx.

By: Fanfoot

Fanfoot — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:18:04 +0000

Don’t know about HFS, but if you compare say disk performance under linux using ext3 to NTFS under Windows the differences are quite staggering, so I’m not at all surpised at the file system performance differences you noted.

I’m somewhat suspicious of the encoding tests though. Handbrake originally came out for the MAC, and was later made available for the PC. Is the version for the PC optimized? Would other PC encode applications perform much better? Can’t tell from your limited analysis. Honestly, it seems unlikely that something so CPU bound would have different performance from one OS to the next to any great degree. More likely you’re seeing differences in the implementation of the encoders.

By: Luis

Luis — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:53:55 +0000

Ah, and since you’re willing to test out things, including Linux in a LAPTOP transfer test would be nice (it would tell if NTFS is very slow or HFS very fast).

By: chevy

chevy — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:16:15 +0000

Did you use the same DOS when testing Vista ? BootCamp usually uses FAT32 instead of NTFS, which slows down the disk access significantly.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:56:51 +0000

I would like to see speed tests run on similarly configured PCs-turned-Hackintoshes. If the conclusion is that notebooks running Vista are slower because of a bloated OS, then what would happen if you switched it out for OS X?

By: Luis

Luis — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:35:02 +0000

I am surprised by the transcoding test, since this depends on the CPU and in the codec implementation itself, not so much on the OS. However, I’m glad that someone finally proves how SLOW NTFS (the filesystem used by Windows) is.

Any owner of a netbook with a slow SSD has experienced what a HUGE difference it makes to install Windows using FAT instead of NTFS. And to be honest, FAT is an old and very underperforming filesystem itself. HFS (used by OS X) is also not a performance champion, but compared to NTFS it flies (as proved in your tests).

I stopped using Windows 5-6 years ago because of the unbearable NTFS performance (I use Linux since). I’m amazed that Windows can’t fix this horrible problem with their OS in so many years (and also amazed that not many people talk about it, so thanks for that).

Battery life seems much better under OS X too. The 13 inch MacBook consumes 9.4 watts in your usual test. Similar hardware in Windows is in the 12-14 watts range.