Will Windows Vista Have Better Performance Than Windows XP?

Tests that have been done by magazines running identical software on identical hardware (with a configuration corresponding to that of a typical PC) with only the operating system varying between XP and Vista found that, on Vista, programs ran more slowly.

Microsoft claims, however, that the performance of Vista will scale with hardware improvements to a much greater extent than Windows XP. This means that Vista should be able to take greater advantage of large amounts of RAM to deliver substantial performance improvements. Vista may perform more poorly than XP on systems with less than 1 gigabyte of memory but more quickly on systems with more than this amount.

Vista is also able to take advantage of flash memory inserted into a USB slot. This is particularly fast kind of memory and, if present, Vista will use it for caching data which should boost the performance of a system significantly.