PC Mag has posted results of benchmarking tests they ran on Windows 7, XP and Vista. The website used a 1.73GHz Toshiba Satellite m45-S269 laptop with 1GB RAM and 100GB hard drive for the tests. PC Mag compared Startup and Shutdown time, Picasa video encoding time and results of benchmarking tools including Geekbench, SunSpider and PCMark05 for the three operating systems.

The results of the test were divided equally, as out of the six tests XP outperformed Windows 7 in three tests that included Startup time, Picasa video encoding and PCMark05. And Windows 7 outperformed XP in Shutdown time, Geekbench and SunSpider. Windows Vista didn’t top any of the tests.

Michael Muchmore of PC Mag Concludes, “For the most part, these tests don’t show Windows 7 soundly trouncing XP. But for an operating system that’s far richer in features and more advanced in interface, Windows 7 is quite close to the older OS and tops it in several tests. In all, I think Windows 7’s performance gains are welcome steps toward ending the reputation Microsoft’s operating systems have gotten for code bloat. On none of the tests did Windows 7 score last among the three versions of Windows tested. XP, which is finally starting to show its age, scored dead last in three.”

The article on PC Mag talks in detail about all the benchmarking tests and is a very good read.