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Researchers Sour on Vista Service Pack 1 Performance
Stony Stevenson passed us a link indicating that a group of researchers has described Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as basically a performance dud. Researchers from the Devil Mountain Software group is claiming that a series of in-house benchmark tests showed that users hoping to receive a speed boost from the update will be disappointed. "Devil Mountain ran its DMS Clarity Studio framework on a laptop Barth described as a "barn burner" -- dual-core processor, dedicated graphics, and either 1GB or 2GB of memory -- to compare performance of the SP1 release candidate that Microsoft released last week with the RTM version that hit general distribution last January. The Vista RTM was not updated with any of the bug fixes, patches or performance packs that Microsoft has pushed through Windows Update since the operating system's debut. 'One gigabyte, 2GB [of memory], it didn't make a difference,' said [CTO Craig] Barth. 'SP1 was never more than 1% or 2% faster.'"
nobody gives a shit about vista and neither should you.
Did Microsoft say it would improve overall system performance?
Microsoft has all but given up on Vista. A lot of corporate customers are going to sit it out and wait for the next iteration of the OS to come out. People who have it generally aren't that impressed, at least among the family and friends I've spoken to about it (not a large sample set, I'll grant you). Vista is the new ME, the sooner it dies and MS dumps it the better off we'll all be.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
50 million lines of code and they couldn't find anything that needed optimization?? Or were their priorities elsewhere? These days, optimization always seems to be relegated to "low man on the totem pole."
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
it will take longer for me to see the BSOD?
Wouldn't the summary be more accurate by saying "Vista a performance dud"?
root@allevil:~#
Of course, Microsoft want to force everyone have to buy Vista after June 2008, so Moore's law has got to get a shift on to make sure that PCs are going to be fast enough to actually make it usable. Or perhaps it will encourage Microsoft to extend XP's availability. Or perhaps's it's time to stock up XP licenses if you need to run Windows.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
"This is a BETA, it is not finished yet. Everything will be alright when it is released."
Service packs are mostly bug fixes, new drivers and more features, right? None of those make systems faster.
In our university we have now completed the upgrate of 25 computer classrooms (35 computer each) from XP to Vista. At the moment, there havebeen no major problems. yes, the system has some problems and child diseases (like Abbles leopard) but that's just natural. Vista is a big step forwars security wise and it will get more and more polished with time.
But hey, please feel free to continue bashing... I don't want to spoil the party for you. Me? I'll continue using it.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Last one out of Redmond, please turn off that god damn useless big ass table...
Without wishing to troll, when has a Window service pack ever improved the speed of a Windows OS?
In fact, and I'm sure someone on Slashdot has raw data on this (that perhaps even shows I'm wrong), Apple are the only company who has ever achieved this on a regular basis.
I've found in my rather short development career is something scarily similar to the first law of thermodynamics: "Bad code once created can never be destroyed." In most commercial situations, the risk of breaking a routine far outweighs the benefit the change brings.
We've built an entire area of study, refactoring, on trying to sell the importance of keeping code clean. I'm still not 100% convinced that the case for refactoring has been made. If you spend three months refactoring, is the simpler overall structure really going to speed up development sufficiently to justify the capital outlay? In all but the very worst code-bases, the answer is unclear.Bear in mind, refactoring my cause you to notice bugs that you can't fix because it would break an interface. Now your code has to be badly structured to support this bad business logic. This can be enough to render the effort useless.
This is why service packs rarely improve functionality or performance. Windows XP SP2 is a notable exception. The risk is simply too great.
Simon
...but does anyone get the feeling that they aren't as dumb as the general public thinks they are? I can't help but wonder if this isn't some kind of scheme to land a ton of customers a few years down the road. They knew that with the myriad of ever-improving Linux distros and Apple's new OS X Leopard, there wasn't much they could do this time around to compete. XP held for so long because it (after a few years of grooming) turned into a rock-solid piece of software that was welcomed with open arms by both businesses and individual consumers alike. There wasn't as much competition at that point from elsewhere on the digital globe, so bleeding-edge features that may or may not work were not required.
Rather than create an OS to compete with the new generation, they made one that was set up to fail. They'll now be able to kick back and watch as the game continues to play out, observing the moves of their opponents...taking notes the whole way. Then, in the next couple of years, they'll be able to release a killer new system with all the features consumers want and none they don't. The whole time, no one will be paying attention to what's going on because so many will have simply given up on them. By that point, it will be too late for everyone else.
At least...this is my fear for the moment.
...that a large amount of their userbase doesn't even know that there are alternatives. It's a shame really. Because I guarantee if Microsoft had less of a market share they would focus more on these details like optimization and straight up good code because if they didn't they wouldn't survive. Now it just seems they do only the amount of work required to keep the train rolling and their riders complacent. I'm in a workplace where 99% of the computers run Windows XP, and the sad thing is that it's a technology company that deals with security and networking. You'd expect that a large majority of them would have heard of linux or even unix for God's sake, but hardly any have. It's a Windows world and Microsoft knows it. They'll do the bare minimum amount of work possible.
Vista has one great selling point as far as I'm concerned: DX10. It's inevitable that games will eventually require it, though so far it's not exactly a big deal.
So I notice Crysis has a "Very High" setting that's disabled for me in XP. Ok, I think, the first half or so of the game runs ok with High settings, so maybe it might just barely be playable on Very High. Just to be able to see what it looks like.
I boot into Vista and install the game there. Lo and behold, it runs at almost exactly half the FPS on High compared to in XP. Had to drop it to Medium to be even remotely playable. Needless to say, Very High is what I'd need to be to enjoy it with everything at max.
Is the culprit crap drivers for my hardware, general performance drain by Vista, or DRM using everything it can to make sure I'm actually allowed to use the computer today? I don't know, but I do know Vista has made me seriously try a Linux on a desktop for the first time (only used it for servers until now). If only more games supported it, or ran under Wine, I'd be happy as can be.
SP1 has greatly improved performance for me and almost everyone else I've talked to. Let's not forget to mention that almost all software compatibility issues have been resolved and that it's genuinely more secure than XP. But I guess Slashdot can't go a day without posting an anti-Vista story!
Do some research and you'll find you don't need a service pack to tune Vista:
Turn off: Volume Shadow Copy (files won't be versioned automatically any more), indexing service (rapid searching won't work any more), and SuperFetch (apps wont be pre-loaded and so will start slower, but you'll have more "free memory" on average - a debatable benefit anyway).
You'll notice XP levels of disc activity (barely any) and lot's more free memory. That's because Vista's not doing anything. Personally, I like to be able to search instantly, have apps load instantly, and have my critical files backed up transparently; so I don't mind the "bloat".
Anyway, if you actually know how Windows works, you'll know what you don't want running and what you do. Turn off the stuff you don't want, but most people are fine with the defaults even if it means using more resources.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Don't be wise here. Every story must be anti-microsoft.
It helps to prop up the self-esteem of the inferior shit eating Linux crowd.
Macs for fags, Linux for turds, Windows for the rest of us.
Researchers Sour on Vista SP1 RC1 Performance
Only, that one was from PC World Canada.
AND... they at least listed the RC's version (0.275) and explained the tests (well, kinda...),the difference in performance AND the hardware used. http://www.pcworld.ca/news/column/3eef651f0a010408008b33e8065121c5/pg1.htm
WTF is a "barn burner"?
Also, saying "Office-based test script was "statistically insignificant,"...while a multitasking test panel produced results for SP1 less than 1% faster than RTM." doesn't really say much.
Adding to that the first (T)FA actually bothered to mention WHAT was the RC about... Instead, Microsoft says, the service pack beta improves stability, performance, and reliability when reactivating a machine from Hibernate or Suspend mode; enhances device-driver support; increases security; and adds support for new standards such as Extended File Allocation Table (intended to enhance flash storage on notebooks, not desktops). ... kinda makes this (T)FA even more non-informative in comparison.
In fact... first thing that comes to my mind after reading TFA (the "Barth said"-part) is Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction:
"Check out the big brain on Barth!"
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Wait for the final version, then measure.
Everyone seems to have their own Vista experience and often times they are bad. When one of my kids headed off to college I was faced with the XP vs Vista dilemma (I know better alternatives exist). My gut feeling was XP was the better choice but Microsoft FUD convinced me that my non-technical child was better served by a "fully supported" product. After less than 1 month away at school I got the dreaded nothing works phone call. My Vista experience is limited but I am a system administrator in a large (1000+) organization of Linux and XP systems so I figured I could work through problems. Long story short, the Vista Business system stopped working for no apparent reason. Windows explorer repeatedly crashed, a death sentence for Windows. Said student was 400 miles away so university tech support determined a destructive reload was the only solution, after backing up personal data. After that I loaded the same version at work and have repeatedly run into problems. It's not a good product, simple as that. Sure many have had success but the average user better hope they don't have a problem since, it appears, noboby and fix them. I doubt a service pack will solve that.
Parent isn't even close to being a troll, somebody please fix this.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Ya know, "938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack". This certainly improved "perceived" performance issues for me as far as ridiculous copy/move operations, etc. And according to this: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=95709 it claims to fix more than just the copy/move thing.
Is this in SP1?
"In the end, we all fall back on fiction." -- Lonely Planet
A Release Candidate is just that, bar show stoppers it is a final release.
No major changes will be made to it.
If you are still defending the Vista then I have some shares you may want to buy.
Stick to XP (still the best MS has made.)
Don't make your problems my problems!
...it will also make Leopard even faster.
Aggressive Key-Accounting and the general uninformed public will keep MSFT afloat, though.
Cancel-or-Allow RSI will be on the rise, too.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I got Ultimate when I bought my new system. It's a nice machine, but nothing ridiculous - low-to midrange core 2 duo processor, 3 gigs of RAM, Geforce 8600. I haven't had any performance problems. Compatibility issues, yes. But no performance issues. Only thing that's vaguely interesting is that it takes a second or two after Firefox pops up for it to access my homepage. What configurations expect a performance issue?
I have an old Dell Latitude xp450c that cost someone (not me) probably about $2500 in 1995 but today its not worth anything except to battery, memory and ac adaptor sellers who have more of these to sell, then there are such laptops existing.
This is a 50Mhz 486dx laptop with a 8megs of ram. What OS can I reasonable run on it besides DOS, baslinux (basic linux - damn small linux is to big). and some floppy based OSs like maybe if I can even QNX demo of i can even find it anymore? To bad I can't get AROS to run on it.
I also have an Amiga 4000 Toaster that runs at a warp engine speed of 28Mhz though I have more ram in it. and its still useful.
The point is, when it comes to OSs today the performance is pretty much a dud in a fair comparison to the better OSs of yesterday.
There has been a code bloat to use up increased speed, memory and storage in OSs today.
Today you can buy 1 gig thumb drives that could hold your whole system, personal files and duplicate backups of the same and still have plenty of room.
In fact, we should today have such sub-gig personal thumb drive based systems. Expecially considering what the more common applications are.
Performance sucks today, and its not just a windows bloatware matter.
I'm sure the only thing tying you to Windows these days is your own aging skill-set. Let's face it, Windows has always been your bread-and-butter as a programmer right? Well one could see why you would feel slighted when others bash what you've spent a large amount of your life learning and suffering with. The cold truth is: The Windows skill-set is in danger if MS keeps dropping the ball. Every time MS drops a steaming pile of OS on the market, more people make the switch to Apple, or Linux, and your skill-set degrades just a notch. The thought of mass defections from Windows probably makes you wake up in a cold sweat at night. Well, I'm not going to sugar-coat it: Vista is turning many people elsewhere, and Apple is making all the right moves in the market right now to swiftly pick those disenfranchised folks up. It's only a matter of time before the market tips and non-windows machines are the minority in many areas. It may not be tomorrow, or even ten years from now, but I've lost all hope in MS pulling up from the tailspin they are in.
In closing, I think that there is no better time then RIGHT NOW to expand your skill-set to include Windows agnostic developing. Because I'm of the opinion that there is a huge shift happening in the market right now, just very slowly...
God is real unless declared integer.
...Vista is NOT about performance. It's about security. The market demanded a 'more secure' Windows, and Microsoft delivered. The market once demanded speed, and MS delivered Windows 98.
Not the least bit surprising. Vista is 90% DRM and 10% OS. We have switched all our machines to Ubuntu. Join us in the 21st century, dump M$ and the Vista trash! ;-) Bobby B
i bet ati WONTFIX your issues. and every one else CANNOT.
The market doesn't demand ONE thing at a time. To think so is just asinine. Microsoft is more than capable of delivering on more than one front. One doesn't necessarily have to give up speed for security; MS for some reason just can't or wont deliver performance, security, and a capable UI all together in one package. They've gotten it right here and there, but it seems like they drop one for the other when they really don't need to.
God is real unless declared integer.
Dear Microsoft: Vista is a bust. Vista sucks. You must know that already. This letter is simply to get it on the record and as far out in the open as possible.
Consumers, business users, developers, gamers and anyone else you may have chosen as a target with any of the forty-two versions don't want it, don't like it, don't care about it and most of all, don't get why you seem to ignore these facts.
You seemed to have done all you could to muck it up. Over-promised and under-delivered, Vista not only missed several announced ship dates, when it was released, it was clear it still wasn't ready. Users are making it clear they intend to stay with XP, regardless of how difficult you may make such efforts. I guess they figure you if you can't come thru w/Vista, any threats you make are toothless as well.
So, to wrap this up, let's go over it one last time. Vista offers nothing. Vista will go down in history as yet another symptom of the total lack of imagination that is Microsoft. Microsoft will do down in history as having failed as the fault of no one but Microsoft. As goes Vista, so goes the mothership. Stick a fork in it...the fat lady has sung, Elvis has left the building, it is all over but the shouting and way to go Bill. You've finally convinced the world you have no vision. You've never had any and now even the crows know it.
Asta la vista, Vista!
A Researcher Sour on Vista SP1 RC1 Performance
Let's see. . . 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista. . . Yup, only the even numbered releases are any good. Just to be safe they'd best rebrand Windows 7 as Windows 8. ;-)
The Service Packs to XP fixed issues and improved the user experience, but each of them degraded system performace by a measurable degree. An average of 20% on many laptops byt some measures. More and more RAM was required to overcome the system sucking done by the Service Packs. That anyone anywhere thought that Vista's performance would improve with a service pack is laughable at best, an indication of some kind of intellectual blindness at worst.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
So my DRM is being upgraded? Should I be excited?
The worst thing Microsoft has ever done was put Mickey Mouse in charge of kernel development. Letting Hollywood dictate the kernel design will prove to be the undoing of the Windows platform.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Vista sucks, read all about it!!!!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I wonder what, if anything, they targetted with their performance boost.
For instance, I find Linux 2.6.23 feels marginally faster than 2.6.22, so that's probably a good vote for the new scheduler, but in terms of raw processing throughput, it is actually marginally slower on my system (My metric here is the combination of RAID, NIC and file cache throughput).
As Vista is a desktop OS, any improvements to responsiveness would be a Good Thing, even at the expense of a little overall performace reduction.
Of course, artifical benchmarks just aren't designed to measure that sort of thing (Pretty much all current benchmarks measure 'throughput', but not 'latency'), so we may never know!
It's unfortunate that you've been modded to 5 because your performance recommendations might be useful for a games-oriented computer, but they'll badly hurt the performance of a mixed-use Vista system.
I'll start with "free memory". Vista's memory handling is similar to Linux - free memory is kept to an absolute minimum in the interest of keeping as much as possible in memory. Just because free memory is low doesn't mean "available" memory is low. Any memory used by SuperFetch is available for reuse at any time, it just doesn't show as "free." SuperFetch is the magic that makes Word and Visual Studio open almost instantly. Turning off SuperFetch will KILL your performance. All work done by SuperFetch is done as low priority I/O and has minimal impact on running apps.
Turning off Volume Shadow Copy may save a little disk activity (very little), but if you turn off Volume Shadow Copy you'll lose the ability to roll the system back if you install a bum driver. Really, really bad idea. (Note that VSS has existed on XP for years and I've never heard anyone complain about it there.) Turning off VSS is about as smart as taking the batteries out of your smoke detector.
Indexing service does cause a lot of disk thrashing, but (like SuperFetch) it's done with low priority I/O. Running indexing on XP could absolutely kill your system. Running it on Vista is pretty much a non-issue unless you are memory constrained. Unless you have a photographic memory and know where all of your documents are, you won't be saving much time if you are manually searching for your documents.
If you are having that much trouble with performance, spend $50 and buy yourself another Gig of RAM. Vista runs fantastically well with 2GB RAM.
What can you say about a platform when the best thing to happen to it in years is that it can now run Windows? I notice the boys at Sun Microsystems like them too. They blow away the OS and run Open Solaris on the hardware. I guess since they don't compete with Apple, it beats buying their employess DELL and HP laptops.
The Mac is snazzy. I made allot of trips to COMP USA looking the PRO over. I also checked out friends machines. In the end, when you take glitz away, you click, the drive acuators make some noises and you still wait for an app to load. When it does its the same old same old. And if you need to run Windows (I do - Visual Studio, SQL Server...) it's an expensive way to do it.
Windows and VISTA could of course improve - no doubt. But the MAC is not the solution, and as I predicted quite a while ago and we've now seen, as the volumes go up, the differences will fade away. Note the problems with the last two upgrades. Trivial, when compared to Windows VISTA upgrade issues, but the volumes are still small and the machines mostly much newer.
Charles Sheffield has provided some insight into this topic.
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook487.htm?cache
Story "Out of Copyright" from the book "Dancing With Myself"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Did MS Jump the Shark?
While WinMe was worse for a horror in itself, now we have a wasteland.
I thought I saw pre-articles about Windows 7 as being *less* bundled (as a desperate attempt to save what hasn't rotted yet and quarrantine the disaster code.)
They're riding on inertia, but that inertia will take them a very long way before they truly collapse.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I can't figure out if I'm just brilliant when it comes to selecting computer components, or I'm the only one who doesn't take a bat to my machine and then wonder why the machine no longer works. You guys keep saying that Vista is slow, and I'm forced to believe you when you say that yours is slow. But mine, mine is not slow. Hell, forget mine. I just bought my grandparents a machine. $1'800.00 got them a 2GHz, 2GB, 24", office, ultimate. No dedicated graphics card. No dedicated sound card. No dedicated NIC. No dedicated anything. It's responsive, it's reliable, it's stable, and it works as fast as anyone would want it to work in full aeroglass beauty. Now, they aren't running photoshop, nor any CAD app, but they are running office, a bunch of games, digital camera stuff, and the typing of the dead.
So why is your machine so slow?
Microsoft had a spectacular first quarter. and, as the night follows the day, will show enormous strength in all divisions in it's second quarter. The Geek knows this is coming, but he can't change a thing about it.
I thought it interesting that Google returns almost nothing about Devil Mountain Software except a rehash of this story about the RC for Vista SP1.
It was Goofy.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
...just not really any love for it.
Vista is merely slightly slower than XP.
Some would beg to differ--i.e. those with low spec machines. Anyways for most people I'd say isn't that it is more bloated and executes slower, it is that the interface design changes make them less productive ("it looks like you are about to sneeze...accept or allow?", rearranging control panel, config dialogues and whatnot..all the crappy annoying stuff MS is legendary for doing between major releases).
Do I really care whether things are theoretically a few percent slower if I can't tell the difference without actually benchmarking?
Only if you've bought a new computer and had it foisted upon you. If I went to the bother of going to the store, putting down good money to buy the upgrade, then sat for hours installing and tweaking it to my tastes, it damn well BETTER be faster, or smarter, or SOMETHING. For most people who would consider upgrading, translucent spinny 3D windows and pester-ware security just isn't worth it.
I wouldn't want to use it day-to-day, but that's the same as any version of Windows.
That is something most computer users don't have the luxury of saying because Windows is all they know. Vista isn't horrid (it certainly cannot match WinMe in crappiness) but it's just a step sideways from XP, especially some power-user's tweaked out XP with thrid party add-ons (I've even seen magazine articles on "Vistafying XP for free"). Why go through all the pain of having half your peripherals not work right due to no Vista-approved drivers, buying extra ram or hard drive, spending money and time, learning a changed-up interface...if you get nothing tangible out of that effort? For a lot less trouble you can quite literally switch to Ubuntu (probably less than half the cost and effort to do that than to adopt Vista).
This annoys consumers and it completely drives away corporate customers. We are entering a time now where MS can't just offer something new--it actually has to be BETTER in the real sense.
Try running Ubuntu on the same hardware and compare times for similar functions.
I can guess they would find that Vista is there to protect M$'s buddies "IP" and only incidentally to run the "consumers" computer.
Also, does it really matter what M$ does in so far as performance? The whole idea of being a monopoly is that you dont have to do anything except collect obscene amounts of money.
Ugh, sheep.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
"DX10. It's inevitable that games will eventually require it"
Why? To get an extra 10 fps? The normal hardware upgrade cycle will fix that, and let game manufacturers continue to ship with DX9. Heck, there are still games being sold that run fine under Win9x.
As Nintendo showed, its not necessary to require the latest and greatest hardware to have the best product.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Oh, just noticed your alias. That makes perfect sense then.
[Cancel] [Allow] [Thrash the disc around some more] [This button has been disabled by Warner Brothers (R)]
Mod parent up for educating LingNoi on logical fallacies. LingNoi, maybe next time you can try Google when people are using words you don't understand. Otherwise, let the grown-ups talk. Thanks.
They claim to address "specific performance issues".
Translation: There were two things which were slow and they sped them up a bit.
If some moron thinks it's going to make his CPU or RAM faster, that's his problem. My only worry is that the same moron might get some advertising revenue from all the hits slashdot just generated on his web site.
No sig today...
I have an old IBM PC300GL with 384MB RAM and a Pentium II-550. The BIOS can't handle a partition >8GB so I have my 30GB drive cut up into 5 equal sized pieces. The OS and all the apps I need on it occupy one half of one partition. The slowest aspect of the booting process is the amount of time the Orinoco PCCard inside the ISA adapter holster needs to establish a wireless connection. The slowest thing on the system, as one would guess, is starting Open Office. Otherwise the performance of the machine is entirely fine.
I've had PC300's of different types with Pentium-II's from 450Mhz and as little as 288MB RAM that ran acceptably well for their intended purpose.
Running Ubuntu on the same hardware would tell us nothing about the performance of Vista. Not to mention that BestBuy or Circuit City or whatever places that sells the computers that people buy, don't sell computers with Ubuntu on them. Besides, If we were to go with a linux distribution instead of windows, I would recommend Mandrake/Mandriva over Ubuntu, or maybe Kbuntu in the least.
Most people don't care about the politics of a monopoly. It just isn't on their radar. They look at the price of a computer, if they want to pay it, they will. If they don't, they won't. The idea of having 27 different operating systems to choose from or maybe 200 different web browsers doesn't cross the minds of the average person who looks at a computer as a means to an end and not a philosophy.
And yes, it does matter what MS does in performance. Because Tech and bottlenecks are interesting to people. and some people do not have the option to install something else. Not everyone can drop what they are doing and stand on a linux soap box. Most people don't know how to stop from getting spyware installed on their computer let alone installing another OS or whatever. And they don't care to know either, they are perfectly happy taking it to the geeksquad, relying on the rocket scientist that lives next door to tell them that it is a 2 year old computer, treat it like a car and junk it to buy a new one.
For me, it will be a bunch of mediocre desktops that I will have to support running Vista because some CIO saw some flashy presentation and thought we should have the latest OS. But they also believed that it would run on anything and budgeted accordingly. So if a service pack increases performance then it ends up benefiting me to some degree. You see, I administrate more then the home computers.
Not in my experience. On the Macs at work that connect to the NetApp CIFS shares are quite slow using the built in Samba client. Buying ADmitMac speeds them up a bunch and is in fact what NetApp themselves recommend. Likewise we have a Samba server and it is notably slower with Windows XP clients than a Windows 2003 server with similar hardware and lesser IO. I certainly don't find Samba to be speedy and indeed we use NFS between our UNIX systems and the NetApp for this reason.
Consider, for a moment, a similar strategy for a top incumbent Republican. I don't believe for a second he is as stupid as put up in the press.
"...are committing suicide at the gates of the city. We will make them commit more suicides"
The things that reviewers seem to be missing...
1) Some of the performance updates scheduled for SP1 were already released as Updates.
2) Performance on a System of 1GB (the sweet spot) will see virtually no improvement, and they are reviewing systems with 1GB and 2GB or more. If you baseline the performance difference on a 512mb system the performance difference is more dramatic.
3) There are also a few optimization that don't affect most users. Readyboost got a significant jump in how it improves performance, and there has been refining of Superfetch as well. This includes not only USB flash, but Solid State and hybrid Drives will see significant boosts.
4) File copying in RTM did have some performance problems but the majority of the problem was the screen not accurately reporting it was already copying files when it said 'calculating time', so SP1 gets about a 10% boost, but the dialog reports the process more accurately as well.
If Windows Update wasn't doing its job and the updates hadn't already been being released, SP1 would be more of a one time dramatic increase. Also they need to be looking at lower end system when testing if they want to see more SP1 improvements.
Finally, older and pre-Vista designed system configurations see more of a bump as well. If you test SP1 on a system that has the specific chipsets and HD Audio, etc that is designed for Vista, SP1 won't add a lot, as the system components were already designed and optimized for Vista.
But there are a lot of people out there who mostly use their computer to read and write e-mails, surf the web, write some stuff on an editor that features spell-check. Whose most advanced needs in term of photos is the ability to open an SD card and display pictures by clicking on them. Maybe even IM a little bit.
Linux can bring every thing they need and even more (like reading multimedia) with the added benefit of good firewall function and separated privileges out-of-the-box. Most of those people with simple needs play games either in browser applets or on their gaming console (for which they'll have more cash available thanks to the low PC cost). They are the market for the Green PC, and there *ARE* a lot of them.
In fact, I personally use, as my everyday computer, a Pentium-III on a 440BX motherboard (nearly 10 years old Mobo !). Maxing out the memory to 1GB and upgraading HDD is the only thing I've needed to do the past few years. Linux runs perfectly on it and fulfils all my surfing/IMing/Mailing/GIMPing/etc. needs.
I guess I couldn't even get Vista to work on such old hardware.
The only reason a lot of people buy new machines is because the old one is "too slow", i.e. crawling under the number of viruses and spywares. And then they need to buy bigger hardware in those new machines, in order to support microsoft's bloatware-du-jour that powers it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
get new fucking computers if Vista is slow for you motherfuckers then stick with damn small linux!
A wise man once said "you can't polish a turn" and that seems to be the case with Vista. No matter how much you try to tweak and improve and upgrade it, it will always simply be a piece of crap. Like Windows ME, it will probably always remain in a pathetic and unusable state. It is definitely best to wait for XP SP3, and then wait for the next version of Windows, due out in probably a good 4 or 5 years. If you have the money, save yourself the trouble and get a Mac. OSX really is the best OS currently in existence.
I'm not sure there is much you can do to improve overall vista performance say in games etc... If you look at the benchmarks it is whatever it is compared to equivalent settings on XP, and new stuff (DX10) is pitifully slow cause it's pitifully slow, there's not much a service pack can do about that. However if you look at a lot of applications performance in Vista vs Xp is not much different, if different at all (think FEAR), however any exception is a glaring exception and frustrating. Looking at the numbers I bet a 1-2% performance increase in Vista is probably bringing it to the same level as XP using the latest drivers for a lot of apps.
More relevantly are some of the general scheduling algorithm problems in vista which need to be addressed. Why does playing audio with a network running cause glitches? Anyone playing an MMO with VOIP (essepcially in game voip like tabula rasa and POTBS beta) can tell you this is a problem. When my backup is running, why are 3 of my cores idle, no matter what I'm doing and 1 nearly crippled? Why does it take so damn long to start a program? Now some of that is application level, not OS scheduler, but the time for an app to gain reasonable access to performance is strangely poor. Startup is the same sort of thing.
Ok so windows Vista has a transactional file system. Am I actually getting anything out of that I will ever use? Well truth be told probably, if it prevents partial writes to the system registry which leave it unstable (or any file leaving the OS or app unstable) then I guess it's good. But I'm not sure it's worth the cost, i guess that's a matter of opinion. Ok so supporting parallelism at an OS level is an odd balancing act, between trying to do it at the OS level and exposing cores to the app level. Sony's PS3 has probably the simplest idea, which is 1 cell core for the system processes and 6 cores up to the application to manage, but the PS3 has a limited set of programs it runs at once, Vista has at my count 78 running processes (including backup, excel, task manager and opera atm, with trillian, the NCsoft launcher, AlienFX for case lights, desktop icon manager (DIM), my palm pilot software and logitech mouse drivers), can't it load balance some of that crap around between cores?
If you want to start thinking about the not too distant future then there is definately something to say which is XP64 vs Vista64. Basically nothing works on XP64, and it's a nightmare, less of a nightmare than it was, but still a nightmare, whereas Vista64 seems a dramatic (if incomplete) improvement. I'm not sure it's even reasonable to compare these OS's since hardware vendors basically ignored XP64 when it came to life, whereas they're kinda forced to pay attention to vista64. The transition to windows 7, vienna or whatever the hell it's called is going to be painful when it's 64 bit only.
I think vista FEELs slow because of a poor scheduling algorithm for tasks getting control of the system and having a transactional file system. One of those things is fixable with a patch, one not, and the one that isn't fixable is probably not a bad idea, it's just an expensive one performance wise. That's a painful tradeoff between performance and reliablity, but most of us who've had to manage servers with virtualization and mission critical data understand the tradeoff all too well, as time goes on and the desktop PC begins to incorporate more and more of the HPC world of parallel machines with complicated interconnections and the database space of storing critical data (and while it may not seem like it is critical, no one wants to lose the last 5 years of pictures because of a bad file copy algorithm), it's going to slow the OS down. Autosave is a good example of this sort of tradeoff in the application world, and while the benefits are more obvious I'm not sure that a transactional file system is a bad thing really.
The other serious criticisms of (aside from file copy and game performance and general scheduling) such as too many versions, PIT
I'm far beyond worrying about the performance. I could always buy a faster computer to compensate for slow performance, but there is nothing I can do about the bugs in Vista.
My problems include not being able to multiple select file in Windows Explorer. So if I need to copy 10 files from a folder, I have to manually copy them one by one. Or, as I've had to do in extreme cases, write a little Tcl program to copy the files.
Another favourite is the way Explorer always randomly resets the file views to one of the useless picture views (such as the one with 64x64 pixel icons) even when there is not a single picture in the folder. Which means I have to click on a numer of view settings to find the file I want. _Every_ time I need a file!!
These bugs cost me a LOT of time to get around every day.
Same was true for XP SP1 and SP2. Applications were hardest hit in SP1, networking in SP2, but SP2 tended to, outright, break things more than just slow them down.
:-(
In the past, MS has usually slowed down the previous release with patches and Service Packs, so installing a new OS was an upgrade, mostly because of large rewrites, instead of the "spaghettified" code that had been patched into place.
This time, they bit off too much in Vista -- so much that they didn't have the resources to release XP-SP3 before Vista's initial release. However, I have great confidence that Microsoft will work hard to address Vista's performance deficit (relative to XP) in XP's next service pack.
... because I want to buy a quad core, 4 Gbyte laptop next year.
:-)
Obviously, I'm going to run something else on it than Windows
I'm not sure you can say that a 1% aggregate speed increase is a failure -- depending on how that 1% is distributed.
It is also possible that a slower operating system would be an improvement.
The problem with Vista isn't usually that it is slow. The problem is that it inconsistent; it has a way of interrupting the rhythm of your work that is distracting and frustrating. If you took the 95% of the time that the OS is plenty fast, and made it a tad slower, but then redistributed that speed into the 5% of the time you want to throw your laptop out the window, then you'd have an improvement in usability.
The trick is to make sure the user doesn't notice where you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. I have no problem with the idea of the Indexing Service, but personally I do notice. I don't do a lot of searching for files (I prefer to file them intelligently), but I frequently find myself short of disk IO or CPU, so for me at least the Indexing Service isn't a win.
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