The Register: Microsoft fudges Win2K speed trials

“Microsoft has fudged the results of Windows 2000 Professional
speed tests in an attempt to convince potential purchasers that the
OS offers better performance than NT Workstation 4.0.”

“In the press release announcing the shipment to manufacturing
of Windows 2000 on 15 December, Microsoft said “new benchmark
results illustrate the specific performance benefits that customers
will receive with Windows 2000. These tests show that Windows 2000
Professional outperforms Windows 95, Windows 98 and the Windows NT
Workstation 4.0 operating system running on a computer with a
minimum 64MB of memory”. This claim is not sustained by the
data….”

“The ZD report tells another story that Microsoft did not see
fit to mention: “On average, however, we found that Windows NT 4.0
provided slightly better performance than Windows 2000 when running
with 64MB and 128 MB of RAM. Although the performance difference at
64MB was small, we found that the performance difference between
the two operating systems grew when we added more memory. With
128MB of RAM, Windows 2000 was three per cent slower than Windows
NT 4.0.” The clear extrapolation, unfortunately not tested, is that
with 256MB and more (a real world probability), NT4 would be
significantly faster than Windows 2000.”

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