The IDG test center has presented their performance tests for Windows XP versus Windows 2000. Their tests as well as others, reveal that under most circumstances Windows 2000 is faster than Windows XP. The results are coming in rather consistent if disturbing. For a company to upgrade to Windows XP, one needs to upgrade the hardware or suffer performance degradations. It is basically the same situation faced when considering the upgrade from Win9x to Windows NT or Windowx 2000. The old hardware we were using needed upgrading.

I have been running both Windows 2000 and Windows XP on my home PC and work PC since they were released and I had not noticed much if any performance differences. A close reading of the IDG report told me why. IDG found that both XP and W2K performed well on SMP boxes. Both my home and work PCs are dual processor boxes. Very valuable for certain types of penetration testing such as password cracking.

I am not a game player. I wonder what the implications are for XP Home? Although the IDG tests don't cover game playing performance, I suspect that it will be a problem for game players expecting maximum performance from their systems.