J
Jake Malone - MVP/MUT
February 20, 2008
Despite SP1, Vista is still slower than XP
Filed under: Hardware , Productivity , Windows Vista
So here I am, sitting in the main terminal at Dubai International,
killing time during my six hour layover by sifting through the headlines
surrounding the release Vista SP1. Over at a competitor's site, two
prominent bloggers are really going at it, posting contradictory
benchmark results that show Vista to be either a) on par with Windows XP
or b) much slower than XP on the same hardware.
In each case, the bloggers are focusing on areas in which Microsoft
claims to have improved Vista performance with SP1: file copies, network
transfers, etc. However, neither author seems be paying attention to the
myriad other areas -- productivity applications, services, multimedia
tasks -- where Vista is an absolute dog compared to Windows XP.
Did they not read my previous postings on the subject? I made it pretty
clear last year that Vista was struggling big time vs. XP on comparable
hardware, and that SP1 would be no panacea.
It's like the Microsoft PR machine flipped a switch somewhere and
instantly reframed the entire discussion of Vista performance around
just those areas it improved on in SP1.
News flash, people: File copying is the least of the problems affecting
Windows Vista. Test after test shows that the new OS is a performance
slug across the board.
Even when you disable all of the bells and whistles (Aero, Search) and
turn-off every conceivable background service (Superfetch, ReadyBoost,
etc) -- in other words, strip it down to something comparable to XP in
terms of underlying OS footprint -- Vista is still a good 40 percent
slower than XP on a variety of basic productivity tasks.
The only solution to this generalized performance malaise is to throw
hardware at it: Vista performs quite tolerably on state-of-the-art
hardware. Unfortunately for Microsoft, so does XP SP3. In fact, it
absolutely screams on today's high-end, multi-core desktops and laptops,
which puts customers in the position of having to choose between
functionality and raw performance.
In conclusion: Don't be confused by all of these headline-grabbing
"performance tests." They're focusing almost exclusively on areas that
Microsoft tweaked with SP1. The fact remains that Vista will always
require roughly 2X the hardware performance to deliver an end-user
experience on par with Windows XP.
And when you finally do give in and buy that new "Designed for Vista"
PC, do yourself a favor and provision yourself a small XP partition,
just as an experiment. Don't settle for Vista until you've seen how much
performance you're trading for that shiny new UI and whatever other
bells and whistles you find so irresistible. You may be surprise at just
how fast your new PC really is - once it's no longer encumbered by the
bloat and sluggishness of "Windows 6.x."
Despite SP1, Vista is still slower than XP
Filed under: Hardware , Productivity , Windows Vista
So here I am, sitting in the main terminal at Dubai International,
killing time during my six hour layover by sifting through the headlines
surrounding the release Vista SP1. Over at a competitor's site, two
prominent bloggers are really going at it, posting contradictory
benchmark results that show Vista to be either a) on par with Windows XP
or b) much slower than XP on the same hardware.
In each case, the bloggers are focusing on areas in which Microsoft
claims to have improved Vista performance with SP1: file copies, network
transfers, etc. However, neither author seems be paying attention to the
myriad other areas -- productivity applications, services, multimedia
tasks -- where Vista is an absolute dog compared to Windows XP.
Did they not read my previous postings on the subject? I made it pretty
clear last year that Vista was struggling big time vs. XP on comparable
hardware, and that SP1 would be no panacea.
It's like the Microsoft PR machine flipped a switch somewhere and
instantly reframed the entire discussion of Vista performance around
just those areas it improved on in SP1.
News flash, people: File copying is the least of the problems affecting
Windows Vista. Test after test shows that the new OS is a performance
slug across the board.
Even when you disable all of the bells and whistles (Aero, Search) and
turn-off every conceivable background service (Superfetch, ReadyBoost,
etc) -- in other words, strip it down to something comparable to XP in
terms of underlying OS footprint -- Vista is still a good 40 percent
slower than XP on a variety of basic productivity tasks.
The only solution to this generalized performance malaise is to throw
hardware at it: Vista performs quite tolerably on state-of-the-art
hardware. Unfortunately for Microsoft, so does XP SP3. In fact, it
absolutely screams on today's high-end, multi-core desktops and laptops,
which puts customers in the position of having to choose between
functionality and raw performance.
In conclusion: Don't be confused by all of these headline-grabbing
"performance tests." They're focusing almost exclusively on areas that
Microsoft tweaked with SP1. The fact remains that Vista will always
require roughly 2X the hardware performance to deliver an end-user
experience on par with Windows XP.
And when you finally do give in and buy that new "Designed for Vista"
PC, do yourself a favor and provision yourself a small XP partition,
just as an experiment. Don't settle for Vista until you've seen how much
performance you're trading for that shiny new UI and whatever other
bells and whistles you find so irresistible. You may be surprise at just
how fast your new PC really is - once it's no longer encumbered by the
bloat and sluggishness of "Windows 6.x."