For example, if I need to quickly start my laptop only to check my mail, shutdown and nothing else. The last thing I want is for the OS to be caching up Firefox, my media player and Office “just in case” I’m going to use them. If there’s to be any caching, I prefer the way Ubuntu already does it – caches it after first use.

RAM and CPU usage very very useful thigs also using swap file to. Most of PC today low-end or middle-end and have limited memory/cpu resources – is very important to use all PC resources at all speed.
Also you forget about Superfetch (http://www.howtogeek.com/wiki/SuperFetch) this is only one thing why sometime Vista show best perfomance.

In old time – making resource hungry stupid apps like games – will make hardware developers and market happy – all people want to upgrade.

I understand where you are coming from with regards to RAM used as cache versus RAM used to store physical programs and data, but at the end of the day it’s still RAM usage. What is the operating system loading and reloading that requires that information to be cached so much in the first place?

The Task Manager (Vista) and System Monitor (Linux) are the tools provided for the end-user to monitor their basic system resources. If they are wildly inaccurate, then why are they in the OS in the first place? They are not intended to be the be all and end all of tools – they provide a general overview of what your system is currently doing, that’s all. The only way we could possibly know at a specific level is if we were monitoring the kernel directly, which under Vista is of course impossible, being closed source.

The main goal of the article was to show general resource usage for performing basic every day tasks. Not everyone does complex image manipulation, virtualisation, or SQL, and some people use their Office package for nothing more complex than writing up a one-page advertisement for a lost cat. The main reason I did not include an Office comparison is because I was evaluating resource usage “out of the box”, and unfortunately Vista does not come with an Office package, nor do I own (or wish to purchase) a licence for Microsoft Office – Vista is expensive enough as it is! Everyone browses the Internet, plays MP3′s and plays Solitaire, however, and both vendors provide such functionality out of the box. This also wasn’t a benchmarking test to see who performs better or faster – it was a resource usage test.

Battery life is a good idea – I’ll consider that for a future comparison.

Also note that we deliberately did not make any tweaks or modifications to either OS. This tests what each vendor believes the end user should have as a default desktop and as a result, how much of the system it takes to provide it. Microsoft do have a habit of preloading a number of things into memory as evidenced by the simple fact that the hard-drive keeps rattling away even after you’ve logged in. Ubuntu chooses to only load it if you asked for it, which in the past has brought it accusation of slow loading times of certain apps, in particular OpenOffice.org.

For the record, Ubuntu does ship and load an indexing and search service by default as well – called Tracker – and it also loads an interface applet for it as well, it’s just not visible by default, but rest assured it’s indexing in the background as a service. See System->Preferences->Sessions and scroll down the list of startup programs.

Thanks for your input, and Happy New Year!

One fair comparison you can do is running benchmarks of apps common to the two OS (which would be interesting) such as running times for a Gimp filter, VirtualBox, OpenOffice.org sheet calculations, MySQL queries.

Another meaningful test would be measuring battery life of a notebook.

Finally services should be enabled/disabled accordingly: Vista offers a search service, for fairness Beagle or similar should be enabled in Ubuntu, or the indexing service disabled in Vista, etc.