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Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP
erikvlie writes "Pfeiffer Consulting released a report on User Interface Friction, comparing Windows Vista/Aero with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP — which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X. The report was independently financed. The IT-Enquirer editor has read the report and summarized the most important findings."
It is there (pdf link).
Next time you have two Word documents open, try hitting apple+` (the key above tab). You may be pleasantly surprised, and it does conform to the OS X methodology of separating windows from applications quite nicely. I agree that Expose is overkill for such purposes.
Finder locks up, because it's a giant ball of shit, but other OS X applications shouldn't lock up enough to force a reboot. Are you 100% sure it's not a bad stick of RAM causing your problems?
Almost always, when people complain about bluescreens in Windows or lockups in OS X, it's bad hardware from my experience. Nearly 100% of the time.
Comment of the year
Vista's I/O subsystem can keep media streaming off the disk even while you are doing tasks like defragging. Vista's malloc is dramatically better (40%+ in my informal benchmarks). Vista's I/O operations can be canceled, so applications don't mysteriously become zombies because of I/O blocking. Vista's disk caching is significantly improved.
You can't expect to run Vista on a 512MB system and get XP-like performance. But if you have 1GB or more, Vista is often actually much faster than XP.
No, Vista can't make your virus scanner scan any faster. It's not going to make your XVID encoder encode faster. But, let's be honest - no OS can do that. It can, however, make launching applications, allocating memory, and disk I/O much more responsive. Which is exactly what it does.
But, hey, you don't actually need to use Vista to decide that it's "terrible".
To switch between applications on OS X: Cmd-Tab
To switch between windows in an application on OS X: Cmd-~
Frankly, I'm glad that they made the distinction between an application and a window, unlike the Windows world. It makes a lot more sense, IMO.
A very subjective review with no hard facts about Vista... And featured on SlashDot, how could this be?
#1) What drivers were used? The optimized ones from NVidia or ATI? Vista has a new Video subsystem with a new driver model, and NVidia and ATI have had to write their drivers from scratch, something that maturity of the XP and other OS drivers just don't have.
#2) Was Aero left on to get the speed improvements? Turning off Aero reduces Vista video performance to XP levels, and turns off many of the accelerated features.
#3) Usability is addressed, but based on what grounds? MS spends millions on usability testing, are we all to be so stupid to conclude that their research in this area is not somewhat valid? Are they taking new users, old file manager type users, Mac users, or what? Facts please.
#4) File copy performance? Again based on what circumstances? Our internal tests show Vista can shove mass amounts of files in many settings several times faster than XP, also without exhausting the system RAM or cache as XP and prior NT bases would. I would like to see how these numbers were obtained.
#5) Menu lag? Again, was Aero turned off, how could they be showing numbers that are in direct contrast to our testing? If Aero is enabled, the UI is not only more responsive, but things like Menus and Windows opening are significantly faster than XP and especially OSX.
#6) Mouse precision? This has to be a joke right? The Windows Input model allows for extremely high resolution devices, and is SOLELY based on the input device used. If you pick up a high resolution mouse that obtains 10x the precision that a low end mouse provides in Vista it is very measurable and based upon the device. If you select another input device like a Wacom Tablet, your input resolution can be adjusted based on the device to scale in factors to several 1000 times the variances they use as examples in the article.
This can easily be demonstrated by a simple example, Ink Input in Vista is extremely high resolution, and captures at an extremely high rate.
Are they using a generic mouse and just hooking it up to the systems to get these numbers?
The mouse precision is the biggest joke of the article...