(07-02-2009, 09:05 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote:(07-02-2009, 01:44 AM)boogerlad Wrote: windows 7 does not perform better than vista, only in bootup time and ram usage. Xp is still the fastest.
Are you sure about that, because that's not what everyone else is saying (no offense to you). For the majority Windows 7 performs far better than both Vista and XP, there's also various benchmarks and tests that confirm it from both reviews on tech sites and from users that have tested Windows 7. Also it performs much better on older hardware than Vista does, here is an example of a test (I can dig up the link some other time):
Benchmarks were done on a 1ghz Atom processor with 512MB - 1GB of ram, Windows 7 performed quite nicely and better than Vista in a lot of cases. Tests were performed without Aero enabled, but it has been reported that even when Aero is enabled it doesn't have much of an impact on performance if any.
Personally for me Windows 7 feels a lot more snappy and fast than both Vista and XP ever did. Compatibility is also great considering it's a new operating system, everything I've installed on it has worked great so far.
@The TC, go with what suits you best. If you are using the 64-bit build of Dolphin, I'd personally suggest Vista x64/Seven x64 over XP64. XP64 is just server 2003 wrapped in an XP Gui. You'll find you will have a lot of trouble installing things, finding yourself having to edit msi installers quite a bit due to incompatibilities.
Both Vista and Seven x64 are just like their 32-bit counterparts, you should be able to install and use everything you use on the x86 version in x64, where in XP64 there were incompatibilities due to it technically being a different platform than the x86 version of XP:
XP x86 = Windows XP
XP x64 = Server 2003 with an XP Gui (several incompatibilities exist with certain software and games).
I would suggest that if your hardware is newer, that you install and use Vista, for older hardware I'd stick with XP. I would suggest waiting until Windows 7 is available in retail before installing it as a production OS despite it already being considered more stable than Vista.
On equivalent highend hardware, vista=windows 7 in performance. If you can kindly show me the benchmarks, I might be proven wrong. That's just my experience though.