The XP Transition – Feel the Pain

The Test

Author's Note: By the time you read this, Release Candidate 1 of Windows XP will be shipping to Preview Program participants and beta testers. Though we had the RC1 code in time to re-test for this article, our efforts to do so were thwarted by an unexpected incompatibility between the new Windows build and the Intel UDMA drivers we used under Beta 2. This made it impossible for us to conduct a true, apples-to-apples comparison of RC1 vs. the other platforms. However, we did run the same set of tests using the native Microsoft DMA drivers, and from what we saw using this nearly identical configuration, it doesn't appear that RC1 will offer *any* significant performance boost over Beta 2. So our analysis here still stands. If performance changes significantly we will reinvestigate this issue if/when it does.