Leopard vs XP vs Vista vs Linux part 2

In part 1 I looked at results from Geekbench, Photoshop and VLC to see how much of an impact the operating system has on application speed. For part 2 I used two more cross platform test, the first person shooter Doom 3 and 3D modeller and renderer Blender.

Leopard vs XP vs Vista vs Linux part 1

I’ve wanted to compare different operating systems on the same hardware for several months, to see how much of an impact the OS has. Now that I have been using my hackintosh daily for over a month with no major issues I felt it was time to start doing some comparisons. One of the benefits of using generic hardware to run Mac OS is that it will happily run any other x86 operating system you care to try. The difficult bit seems to be getting them to co-exist without conflicting.

VMware Vs Virtualbox, round 1

I recently discovered Virtualbox, a free virtual machine client for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’ve had a chance to start some basic benchmarking of Virtualbox, so here are the results compared to VMware fusion. As a reminder, I’m running Mac OS 10.5.2 on a Core 2 Quad @3Ghz with 2Gb ram and a 500Mb Samsung HD501LJ hard drive.

The first test was boot time. Both apps were the only ones running on the Mac, with 512Mb memory allocated and one virtual processor. Windows XP Pro was the guest operating system, freshly installed with nothing extra but a virus checker added and all the latest Windows software updates. Time was measured from clicking the start button for the Virtual Machine to the appearance of the Windows desktop taskbar. VMware took 21 seconds, Virtualbox took 17 seconds. Fairly close, but impressive for the free Virtualbox to knock a few seconds off the commercial VMware.