Don't rush with an answer now, because it's not the one you're thinking.
A month ago, Phoronix performed a rather peculiar comparison among different operating systems, both from Microsoft and the GNU community: a power consumption test. It was one of a kind not only because of the subject chosen, but also because of the methodology employed. I've waited for a more "standar" way of measuring load conditions and nothing else has come our way, so let's make a recap.Using an old Intel Pentium 4 1,46 GHz (Northwood) on an ASUS P4SGX-MX (SiS 650GX + 962L), 2 x 512MB DDR-400, a Western Digital 80 GB, one DVD ROM and the IGP, they pass some tests on Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2), Windows Vista Ultimate, Fedora 8 Test 3 (kernel 2.6.23) and Ubuntu 7.10 (kernel 2.6.22). On a side note, just remind you there was already a previous consumption test for Ubuntu here.
At idle, figures are very close to one another, the two OSes from Microsoft need almost the same amount of power and the Linux versions are 1W below or 2W above. It's when we go to the "load" data that things get interesting: Vista consumes more than XP (so much for that), but the Linux distributions eat 3W more than Vista and 7W more than XP.
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