• Stability (days) - length of days before required reboot or human intervention
• Performance (seconds) - speed of the OS load time from moment of system turn on to ability to start an application
• Efficiency (seconds) - speed of commonly used applications, in this case an empty spreadsheet and new word processing file
• Price ($s) - how much it cost to upgrade or purchase the particular OS in use
• Pain (minutes) - how much effort in time it took to configure the system the first time

Here is how the two systems faired after we ran them for 90 days.  We should point out that the Linux server was still solid and stable and could have run far beyond the 90 day test period.  Now mind you, we were not lab technicians.  We just wanted to see how two different Operating Systems would live side by side for 90 days.  We were shocked what a difference there was.

Over time, Microsoft® Operating Systems (at least the WindowsXP® tested) utterly failed most of the tests.  Our results are listed below.  Again, these are just the basic stats from our personal tests and we do not publish these as some form of official challenge to anyone.

In a particularly overt demonstration of Linux strength, the stat that stands out is in Stability.  This stat was measured in the number of days the machines operated consistantly and effectively without requiring a reboot or system restart.  Older Windows versions would have shown the blue screen of death (sudden occurance of fatal exception errors which forced us to reboot the machine), sadly even on the new Windows machine far too frequently we still in every instance had stability issues, and we had to reboot the Windows machine every 3 days due to serious instability.  We never rebooted the Linux system.

A real suprise stat to us was the Pain statistic, which indicated in number of minutes how long it took to fully install the OS onto the machine and then get it running.  The installation procedure took longer for Windows than for Linux.  This was a shock, but validated the significant progress Linux releases have made to simplify installation.

The only stat that  was not effected by the 90 day duration was the Price, since that was a one time instance and thereby a constant.  Linux won hands down, especially considering that SUN's OpenOffice for Linux is available for free.  This must be compared to a Windows system and the price of MSOffice®.  There are a lot of $s saved in Linux's favor here.

Finally, we  put to bed the challenge that Microsoft runs business related software better.  In fact, the OpenOffice® suite (very similar to Microsoft Office® ) performed better in all aspects including less bugs.  On the WindowsXP® machine both Word and PowerPoint had a number of bugs with printing, displaying wysiwyg text, and in the case of Word, unexplainable sudden termination of the program.

Without a question, in our simple real word test, we watched with our own eyes the benefits of running Linux over a Microsoft® Operating System.  The same hardware, with very different results after 90 days of use.

This article and the Top 5 test is based on computer consultant opinions and not a conclusive test.  For a realistic evaluation refer to more than one source and judge for yourself.
We make no claims to the validity of this article.