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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.'"
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.
No argument from me. You're saying the same thing I did, albeit using a lot more words.