Vista slower than XP

[Guest 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."

[Guest Anteaus]

RE: Vista slower than XP

 

Unfortunately for the average punter, a new PC IS a Vista PC.

 

Most won't have the inclination to try reverting it to XP, or they will balk

at the additional cost of an XP licence AND the cost of an engineer's time to

do the reinstall. Result: They won't buy the PC, but will instead stick to

their old one.

 

Apple are doing quite nicely out of all of this, or so I hear.

 

Highstreet stores aren't, many have taken the sales staff out of the

computer sections, to redeploy them where they might actually sell something.

 

 

Oh well, there goes my MVP. :-(

Still, has to be said.

 

"Jake Malone - MVP/MUT" wrote:

> Despite SP1, Vista is still slower than XP