Now this is handy: Geekbench, a cross-platform (Mac OS-X, Windows and Linux, that is) benchmark system. It’s written in platform-neutral C++.
My aging cobbled-together PC (1.7 Ghz Celeron) returns an overall score of 73.6.
My newish cheap but cheerful PC (3 GHz P4) returns an overall score of: 137.4
Windows 2000 within Virtual PC on the above: 103.5 (I note it was only configured for 128Mb of “RAM”, even though Geekbench claims to need 256Mb.)
In all cases I shut down other applications, but obviously the figures would be subject to whatever background services were grabbing CPU time.
My laptop (IBM T42 1.79GHz Intel) gets 108.5
Here’s something really weird. Windows XP running in VMWare got 29341.3!
Damn, I need to install XP, I’m running W2K and only got 166.2 on the work 3GhzP4.
Technically speaking, Geekbench doesn’t need 256 MB, it just needs 100 free MB or RAM.
“of RAM”, even.