"When Windows users say that Windows 7 is easier to install than ever, what do they really mean? When they say it's faster, is it just in their heads, or is Microsoft really making big strides forward? And, perhaps most importantly, when Linux benchmarkers show us how screamingly fast ext4 is compared to ext3, how well do those figures actually transfer to end users?
"These are the questions we wanted to answer, so we asked Dell to provide us with a high-spec machine to give all the operating systems room to perform to their max. Our test machine packed an Intel Core i7 920, which in layman's terms has four cores running at 2.67GHz with hyperthreading and 8MB of L3 cache. It also had 6GB of RAM, plus two 500GB of hard drives with 16MB of cache.
"The tests we wanted to perform for each operating system were:
"* How long does each operating system take to install?
* How much disk space was used in the standard install?
* How long does boot up and shutdown take?
* How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
* How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?
"We also, just for the heck of it, kept track of how many mouse clicks it took to install each OS."
