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Funny thing is, XP actually runs faster on the same hardware than Windows 98 does, assuming it has 256MB or more of RAM.
That's consistent with what I've found as well. The explanation is this:
XP uses a much more memory (for the OS itself) than Win-98 does, which makes Win-98 faster on "small memory" computers (especially computers with only 64 meg of memory or less). But (due to the small memory assumptions built into Win-98) Win-98 also tops out how much memory it can usefully use (assuming it's installed in the computer) a LOT quicker than XP. So if you have a "lot" (by Win-98 standards, not by current standards) of memory, XP will be able to usefully use a much larger share of that memory. And that will speed things up, because anything you can do fully in memory is something that you don't have to go to the much slower disk drive to do!
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From what I have heard of Vista, it is never faster than XP on any hardware.
Doesn't surprise me.
Every version of Windows has been bigger, with more "bloat", and hence should (in theory) have been slower. However, in the past, improvements in memory usage inside Windows (as more and more memory is installed) have often offset this slowdown due to "bloat" with speedups due to better memory usage. But by the time XP came out, Windows was already doing pretty good memory management, so it's not surprising that MS wasn't able (this time) to make enough additional gains in memory usage to offset the expected slowdown due to the Windows OS just getting bigger and fatter each version!
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Vista just doesn't appear to be as much of an improvement, if anyway, to be worth bothering with for a good while.
FWIW: Even many places that are covered under a MS "site license", where there is no extra licensing costs for Vista (because they have agreed to pay MS some large but fixed bundle of money, for the right to "upgrade" all their PCs to any version of Windows they choose to use), have decided to hold off on Vista for the present. One place I know about (with a large MS site license) actually had a team evaluate the new OS, and issued a recommendation (to the entire business) to only upgrade to Vista if you have some specific "need" (a Vista only feature, for example) that you can't meet with XP (a recommendation they did NOT give about XP, when it first came out). Apparently, they encountered just too many "issues" with Vista (problems with installs, problems with running older software, problems with performance, etc), that they felt that you were far better off staying on the "older" OS until Vista had a chance to "mature" a bit (and get a few needed patches under its belt)...
