I’ve now tested startup times of various AutoCAD releases under Vista. Here are the results, alongside the XP results for ease of comparison:
| Release | First Startup |
Subsequent Startup |
||
| XP | Vista | XP | Vista | |
| 12 | 8.6 | - | 8.2 | - |
| 13 | 2.6 | 1.8 | 1.3 | 0.8 |
| 14 | 2.1 | - | 0.5 | - |
| 2002 | 3.2 | 2.1 | 0.6 | 1.1 |
| 2004 | - | 4.3 | - | 1.7 |
| 2005 | - | 7.9 | - | 4.5 |
| 2006 | 14.9 | 8.7 | 2.6 | 4.4 |
| 2007 | 13.8 | 11.9 | 3.5 | 6.6 |
| 2008 | 14.6 | 10.5 | 3.6 | 6.0 |
| 2009 | 28.9 | 17.3 | 7.2 | 13.3 |
Same caveats as before, plus the following:
- Some AutoCAD releases were not installed on both XP and Vista partitions, hence the gaps in the table.
- The Vista tests were performed on the same PC as the XP tests.
- The system had a 1 GB USB key hanging out the back, giving Vista a theoretical startup benefit over XP.
- It’s very difficult to get meaningful performance results out of Vista because its SmartFetch and ReadyBoost technologies are doing their best to improve performance without user intervention. I may be a geek, but I’m not a good enough geek to be able to tell what Vista was doing behind my back during these tests.
- Repeated startups of AutoCAD 2009 revealed a gradual improvement in startup performance. Startup times went 17.3, 13.3, 12.5, 12.5, 11.0 seconds.
Make of that what you will. In short, in my tests AutoCAD 2009 startup time in Vista is still roughly double that of its recent predecessors and about ten times longer than older releases like R13 and 2002.
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