Hey everybody,

I am just wondering: If I want to compare the performance of a computer with either Windows or Linux running, they should probably use the same software. But yet haven't found any product that works with both of them.

Can someone recommend a solution?

Can you be a little more specific as to what kind of performance testing you intend to do?

There are office suites - Open office
audio-video encoders - ffmpeg, mencoder
media players - mplayer, VLC
system monitors - gkrellm
languages - C Perl Python
Network monitors, Web browsers, email clients, etc. that work on multiple platforms.

Or are you wanting I/O speeds on Hard drives or network interfaces?

hi,

I have an old laptop that I almost no longer use. this laptop with XP on cannot perform basic tasks anymore and if I try to have it on for some time(watch video with VLC) it overheats and shuts down without warning.

On the same machine Mandriva runs fine and I can watch as many vidoes as I want (again with VLC) it can do some multitasking but do get warm.

If you wnt to benchmark the operating systems against each other you could try running one or several instances of identical videos on both systems in VLC and see how it reacts.

No.

Linux normally have better DE performance (mouse/keyboard responsives - some retarded program may still decide to take several seconds to process mouse click), and windows normally have better performance when system hits the swap (I've yet to see any linux distro that would handle swapping on my machine well).
It also depends on configuration and version of OS. For example, tuned slackware 12 kernel will outperform untuned generic slackware 12 kernel, which will be on par with unapgraded(i.e. fast) 5-year old winxp in terms of overall performance (but with better gui responsiveness), which will vastly outperform Ubuntu 9. Something like that. It also depends on hardware - 40-wire IDE cable may mysteriously prevent you from enabling DMA on IDE drives (only on Linux), which will make any windows machine perform better with HDD-intensive operations.

If you have a lot of free time, you can spend your entire life fiddling with various performance options, versions of software, but as far as I know, there's no decent "perfect benchmark" that would measure overall system performance to assist you - you'll have to see/check yourself. There are several (that were already listed) for specific tasks, though.