The XP Transition - Revisiting with RC1

Introduction

Now that Windows XP Release Candidate 1 is available and we’ve had a chance to kick the tires a bit, we’re ready to update the results for our “XP Transition” story. As no doubt many of you suspected, RC1 is indeed faster than Beta 2. However, the performance improvement, as measured by our business productivity-centric test scenarios (see original article for details), is not overwhelming and in no way invalidates our original conclusion: That IT organizations need to budget for additional client PC processing power in order to compensate for the increased demands of Windows XP/Office XP.

What has changed is the amount of processing power you’ll need to achieve comparable performance. With Beta 2, we saw a 30-37% performance delta when comparing our Pentium 4 Windows XP/Office XP test bed vs. the same system running Windows 2000/Office 2000. Under RC1, this delta stabilizes at a still daunting 25-27%.

For more background we strongly suggest that you take a look at our original XP Transition story.  This time around we took a more comprehensive look at performance under Windows XP, testing across multiple CPU speeds and various OS configurations.

The Test