My stepbrother just sent me Infoworld’s performance analysis of Windows XP. The long and short of it is that, using their benchmarks, they found Windows XP to be about 25-33% slower than Windows 2000. The differences were much worse under a heavy multitasking load.

This is all well and good, but I remain a bit mystified, as I have seen very little — if any — degradation in performance when using my PC with the Home Edition of Windows XP, and I have all the UI bells and whistles enabled (the Infoworld folks disabled the flashier Windows XP UI in favor of the Classic UI for fairness). I don’t doubt that XP is piggier than Windows 2000, but if I can’t tell the difference, does it really matter? I would also like to note that people had the same complaints upon Windows 2000’s release, saying it was far slower than Windows NT 4.0, but that didn’t slow down the eventual adoption of Windows 2000 one iota.