not totally pertinent to the discussion, but office 2007, specifically excel, is slower than office 2003 on xp or vista.
i have excel code that takes twice as long to execute in office 2007 than it does in office 2003. the os doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the running time, no matter if it is xp, vista rtm or vista sp1 on x86 or x64.x64 may be slightly faster, but not significant enough to worry about.
Enough with benchmarking the OS - let’s see if Office 2007 is any faster on Vista SP1.
The test
The tests will be carried out on the AMD Spider platform that I have set up in the lab (Phenom 9700, Radeon 3850 graphics card, 2GB of RAM …). I’ve used this system as the platform for a number of benchmarks I’ve run over the past week (for a full spec, see this post).
As for the tests, we took two identical images of Vista - one RTM, one SP1. We then loaded Microsoft Office 2007 Professional onto the system and applied all the patches (including Office 2007 SP1). The system was then defragged and rebooted several times.
Afterwards we downloaded and installed DMS Clarity Studio software which includes the OfficeBench software. This application comes with a comprehensive set of Microsoft Office test scripts. These test scripts, while not perfect (no benchmark solution is) are pretty good and simulate a number of real-world tasks that users might carry out in Microsoft Office. The metric that we’re interested in getting from this benchmark is how long OfficeBench takes to execute the test scripts.
All tests were run five times under no load and five times under load (here OfficeBench runs a small Windows Media Video in the background), and we rebooted the system between each run. The tests were duplicated on Vista RTM and Vista SP1.
Because the results were so well grouped for this test, no results were discarded and times taken to execute the scripts were averaged. The lower the time, the faster the scripts completed and the better the result.
