Alright, My Dell is Posessed.

[flibberdipper]

My old Dell Optiplex 170L must be posessed.  It has a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 and the Intel Extreme Graphics 2, with 512MB RAM, and it's running faster with Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on it than what it did with Windows XP Professional on it. WTH, Dell? Just kidding. So far it is a lot faster, and I was wondering why? Can anyone answer this?

[niksuto]

because it was freshly installed.. fresh installs always run better

[Godlygamer23]

Ubuntu is an efficient OS. Ubuntu paired with Chromium on my old laptop competes with my Windows rig using Firefox even though my laptop is using an old Pentium Dual Core CPU.

[Godlygamer23]

because it was freshly installed.. fresh installs always run better

Ubuntu is just a faster operating system overall.

[Wesley]

Linux in general does not have alot of requirements compared to a Windows OS

[flibberdipper]

because it was freshly installed.. fresh installs always run better

My XP install was only a month old.

[Flojer0]

Ditto what others have said. Linux is pretty much always leaner than windows and usually faster because of it. Linux can also be made immensely lean. Once I was running arch bare metal on my current machine and was using 190 MB of ram at idle, with 8GB installed.

 

Edit: just remembered right after posting, the same OS will get down to around 30MB usage on my raspberry pi (probably the difference between memory usage or 32 bit and 64 bit OS's)