Windows 7 crawls on my personal laptop and office desktop. Both have i5 processors and 4 GB of RAM. It takes several minutes to cold-boot or wake up from hibernation and load Chrome. Minutes of non-stop HD reading.
OTOH Linux Mint boots up faster and is way more responsive. It's actually faster to cold boot Mint than to wake up from hibernation on Windows.
It's anecdotal evidence, but for me Linux is very superior in this aspect.
Interesting to know about the difference. I never cared about boot time or wake up from hibernation. I always keep my mobile systems charged and in stand by when not used and I do a shutdown and cold boot maybe once a week (I know, waste of power and battery cycles and all :) ).
The cpus are irrelevant here so it might be a real filesystems perf difference. What do you use, ext4?
4 GB of RAM costs about $35. My main PC at home has 16 GB of RAM, an i7-3770 and a 128 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as the boot drive. Boot time from off to Windows 8.1 login screen is 6 seconds. That's not hibernation or sleep mode - that's from completely off.
The entire system cost $850. Is that an unreasonable price to pay for a desktop computer?
Definitely something with your machines. My 3 year old ThinkPad X120e with the miniscule AMD E350 processor runs fine with Windows 7. Even my old single core XBMC machine with 2GB memory ran fine until I switched it to Linux (not for performance reasons, though)
You must have some other issues then. I have the same setup and the system just flies, and I'm not even using a SSD. Boot and wake happen in about half a minute.
OTOH Linux Mint boots up faster and is way more responsive. It's actually faster to cold boot Mint than to wake up from hibernation on Windows.
It's anecdotal evidence, but for me Linux is very superior in this aspect.