For as long as I’ve been using OSX I’ve been running XP under VMware Fusion for those can’t-do-without programs, but now that I have my shiny new Macbook with 4GB of RAM I wanted to see whether it’d be possible to run Vista – and preferably Vista 64-bit.
I’m going to be doing a lot of Windows development over the next few months (WHS, Silverlight, ASP.NET) and would much prefer Vista so on Friday I spent some time doing a few benchmarks with both XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit.
(Originally I also planned to test the 32-bit version of Vista, but I couldn’t face an additional two hours of installs and service packs. Plus I decided to do Vista 64-bit after XP incase of any problems).
Note that this is very rough testing using three averaged runs of GeekBench. The OSX timings are included to measure the impact of running the VM, not to draw any comparisons between OSX / Windows performance. I don’t know how Geekbench compares across platforms.
Details:
- System: 2008 Macbook, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 7200RPM Drive
- VM: VMware Fusion 2.0, one VCore, 1.5GB Ram, running from bootcamp partition
- OSX: 10.5.5
- Windows: Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP3, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
- Benchmark: GeekBench 2.0.19 for OSX and Windows (32-bit)
