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PC World Tests Final Version of Vista SP1
Mac writes "PC World ran the final version of Windows Vista SP1 through a first set of tests last night. Here's the bottom line: 'File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and, in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.'"
After installing Vista SP1, it has been determined that the Vista SP2 will be a Vista uninstaller with a full version of XP Professional.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So the gist of TFM is that there's little if any change in Windows iCandy before and after installing SP1, and that copying files still takes much too long. Why bother?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
So how come it rates the front page?
Microsoft Windows 7
GNAA *just kidding*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... the sky is typically blue, the grass is mostly green, and the Pope is Catholic.
I un-installed Vista about 6 months ago and returned to XP. The main reason is because I simply didn't think that the main issues I had with it (some outlined in this article) really could be fixed... at least not with a service pack release or other patches. It seemed to me that the focus with Vista simply had shifted more to the shiny eye candy for end users, and that when you focus on the pretty stuff the necessary stuff will logically be less efficient.
I do have some reasonable high hopes for this new MinWin, but until then, I'll just continue to expect more tests and benchmarks like this one.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
"The Windows Vista SP1 install process clears the user-specific data that is used by Windows to optimize performance, which may make the system feel less responsive immediately after install. As the customer uses their SP1 PC, the system will be retrained over the course of a few hours or days and will return to the previous level of responsiveness." source
Any performance tests that haven't taken that into account somehow can't be taken too seriously sadly, it's a difficult thing to deal with for review, much like a fresh Vista original release, though at least SP1 shouldn't blank out your index system's index, and cause that to re-catalog everything too, that really would cripple immediate post-install tests.
Besides, unless the huge copy time problem has been fixed people will not be happy. Going from 15 minutes to 13.5 minutes is not going to make MS any friends.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
99% of this service pack is Propaganda..
But Microsofts "Mysterious" customers wanted it that way.....and will be quoted as saying it works flawlessly (Funny MS never gives you the names of these so called satisfied customers)
Not saying that they didn't do anything but they want to desperately kill off XP at all costs and the only way to do that is to release a service pack finished or not and act like everything is perfect.
I for one am waiting until SP1SP1 comes out. I'm no early adopter.
I'd love to see em get Vista in proper order, but damn it... All this wasted effort is damn funny... Slopping more junk isn't the answer... Maybe one of these service packs should start stripping away all the excess code. I mean c'mon, 27 minutes to install a collection of bug fixes? 3 reboots? Jesus... and that was on quad 6600. Ouch.
It should also be noted however he was testing the file transfer with a SD card, I would assume they behave similar to your standard USB flash drive and is generally either optimized for speedily transferring large files, or small files but rarely both...
One would think copying a Blue-Ray disc image across 2 hard drives would be more appropriate? Or at least using a standardized mix set of data, both files large and small. Word documents, mp3 files, disc images... But wait this is PC World... Not exactly at the forefront of reliable and unbiased testing...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Performance Results Mixed with Vista Service Pack 1
Files copied faster in our initial tests, but other performance was slightly slower with the SP1 installed.
Melissa J. Perenson, PC World
Wednesday, February 06, 2008 10:07 PM PST
Microsoft's newly released Service Pack 1 may solve some of the performance glitches that have annoyed Windows Vista users and discouraged others from adopting the OS, but it doesn't appear from our initial tests to be a panacea.
In our first tests of the service pack, file copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.
Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing yesterday, and officially sent out to reviewers today (Service Pack 1 was also unofficially unleashed today on BitTorrent, too). Service Pack 1 will be available to users in March, as a download; Microsoft plans to have SP1 integrated into Windows Vista at retail as well, but could not give a timeline on how quickly the update will be included in the retail version of Vista.
We've already covered many aspects of SP1 in previous looks at the initial SP1 beta last fall, and the more recent SP1 Release Candidate that became available in January. A quick recap: Though many of SP1's benefits lie hidden within the bowels of the OS (such as support for standards like Extensible Firmware Interface and Extended File Allocation Table), SP1 is packed with performance enhancements as well. According to Microsoft, more tangible improvements include improved performance when copying, compressing, and extracting files, improved boot and power down times, improved network performance, and other performance-related fixes.
I took the RTM of Vista Service Pack SP1 down to the PC World Test Center this afternoon and unleashed it across a variety of systems to see how it performed. These tests are preliminary and informal ones; the PC World Test Center is working on additional testing, and we'll post additional information--and update this story--as it comes available.
Service Pack 1: Installation
For my installation and file copy tests, I installed Service Pack 1 on a fairly high-end system: Polywell's $4000 Poly P3503-3DT, a model packed with a 3-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 CPU, 4GB of memory, and Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
The first thing I noticed during the installation process was Windows Vista's friendly warning that the installation might take an hour or more. My experience was, pleasantly, far from that: The installation process required just 27 minutes, less than half of what I experienced with the first beta of SP1 back in September 2007. Your experience may vary greatly, depending upon your system's configuration, though: A Dell Inspiron 1420 notebook (with 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU and 2GB of memory) required just 30 minutes to complete; but two other, less powerful systems took far longer to complete the installation.
SP1 required three reboots in all. During a good portion of the installation time, about 18 minutes, Vista reported it was just preparing the configuration, before actually proceeding with the installation.
File Copy: Performance Notably Improved
I performed a series of tests before and after installing SP1. The first test was a file copy test, identical to the one I performed on the beta last fall. I did three passes, copying 1.9GB of files (562 JPEG images) from a 2GB Kingston SD Card to the PC.
Pre-SP1, the file copy averaged 384 seconds; post-SP1, the copy process showed a noticeable improvement, averaging just 348 seconds to complete the same task. That's a 9 percent improvement, a difference you're likely to notice.
I'm encouraged by that improvement. It's not life-altering when you're talking about just 2GB of data, but if the p
TFA says file copying on a test machine showed a 9% decrease (384 secs. to 348 secs.) in the amount of time to copy "1.9GB of files (562 JPEG images) from a 2GB Kingston SD Card to the PC." Yet, further down in article, the author performed "informal" file compression tests on two other machines and found poorer performance when compared to pre-SP1 results.
As someone who uses Vista at work, I for one welcome our slightly faster copy-and-paste overlords.
In case anybody is interest *why* Vista pre-SP1 seemed so much slower copying files than XP, and why post-SP1 for the most part fixes it, you should check out Mark Russinovich's blog post on the matter.
It's a very interesting read.
I so want to insert a Linux related pun here, but I actually can't think of one...
I bet I am going to wake up at two am with the most witty and funniest slapdown of Vista imaginable... and by the time I get to posting, I'd have forgotten it again...
think, Proby... THINK!
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Hm. That's funny... my personal tests conclude that my performance is better without Vista than with it.
Running Vista is a lot like trying to run a foot race in a swimming pool while wearing balls-and-chains on your feet. And then when you get to the end, a big fat lady grabs you out of the water and sits on your chest.
See, if you had just a little bit more beefy hardware, you'd barely even feel the chains.
Oh shoot it wasn't a car analogy.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Microsoft plans to have SP1 integrated into Windows Vista at retail as well, but could not give a timeline on how quickly the update will be included in the retail version of Vista.
I've wondered for a while how many of the Vista sales were similar to the Xbox 360 method of pushing product out the doors at MS to retails/3rd parties and counting that as units installed. I think this could be a good chance to see if that's the case, if we still see pre SP1 Vista boxes this summer I guess I'll have my answer.
His single file copy test was a bunch of files from a flash drive. He copied them three times before SP1, and three times after. He then reports average times, but no reporting of variation. That's not exactly serious benchmarking now is it.
To be fair to PC World they do say that this is informal and preliminary and they will publish comprehensive results in due course. My criticism is that this makes front page of Slashdot (the reason of course is that it's somewhat critical of Vista and therefore of course is great news here in anti-MS FUD world).
It astonished me that stories about Mark Russinovich's blog post on Vista file copying (including changes implemented for SP1 after customer feedback) were rejected.
It strikes me as feeble that the Slashdot crowd all scream FUD! whenever MS are guilty of it (frequently), but then commit the same sin themselves in the other direction.
And the other thing that hacks me off is that this post will no doubt be modded flamebait or troll which means worse karma (got none anyhow) and therefore no voice. It's an interesting effect of the Slashdot moderation scheme that any criticism of Slashdot is suppressed. Free speech doesn't flourish here (unless you follow the herd!)
I've been running the SP1 Release Candidate for a while now and it has improved networking greatly (resuming from Sleep the network is available again immediately unlike pre SP1 where there was quite a lag), and on that front the network discovery and usage of my LAN is better than XP. (Machines are found more reliably and it all just works much more smoothly).
My biggest gripe with Vista has been the DVD Maker. I look upon OSX users with envy because of their iLife. I don't have HUGE needs for my digital media, but I would like to be able to throw one or more videos onto a DVD with a nice menu. I used to be able to do this without effort with Nero, but the version I have was an OEM that doesn't work with Vista.
So, I turned to what Vista has, and was thrilled to see DVD Maker, a simple program that seemed to do pretty much what I wanted and made really, really pretty menus with no hassle.
EXCEPT IT DOESN'T WORK.
I haven't had one successful DVD made using this dang thing.
I have tried burning DVDs with video taken straight from digital free to air tv (so already in DVD resolution and MPEG2 encoded), I've tried Divx files, I've tried everything. While you're creating the DVD in DVD Maker it shows EVERYTHING perfectly. If it burned the disc the way it SHOWED it in the program it'd all be fine... except what does it do?
One of two things:
* Fail with cryptic error at 99% of burn process (except it actually hasn't even touched the blank DVD)
OR
* Burn the disc successfully, but turn all widescreen material into squished 4:3 content... leaving only beautiful 16:9 menus working correctly.
It's utterly infuriating and is the only thing that has made me want a Mac really... just iLife... if I could have that on Windows I'd be happy.
Your mileage may vary. I have a P4 2Ghz 1GB RAM machine that runs Vista as fast as it's 2Ghz centrino duo 1GB RAM cousin. Only difference: With Vista I get more eye candy and a shorter startup time.
:)
No, no fat ladies for me
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista machine (a Quad core Xeon w/8 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium 4 running XP SP2, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Internet Explorer 7 will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various "Vista ready" machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than its XP counterpart, despite Vista's re-written core code. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3.2ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim Vista is a superior OS.
Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over older faster, more stable XP.
It's been done.
If you ask me, Microsoft should provide guidance on stripping stuff out of all its OSes to value-added resellers and to corporate accounts who need them. The same guidance should be available to the geek/hobbiest public on an "as is, unsupported" basis so people could play around. Such guidance should include how to install security patches to stripped systems.
Even better if they provided a toolkit to selectively add or remove components like networking, printing, web browsing, or what-not that are are part of a "core user OS" but not part of the very heart of Windows.
"XYZ Appliance based on Microsoft Windows Vista" or "XYZ Appliance based on Microsoft Windows XP" would make a great VM environment and in some situations, a great hardware appliance.
"davidwr's custom-stripped XP" might make a good core for my next project.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In Borgian Redmond, copies paste YOU! *groan*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why on earth did he not try copying from hard disk to hard disk, from network, large files and on the same disk? 9% improvement from a dog slow start isnt anything to chear about either. Since its still significantly slower than XP it sucks. Some reference points would also be very nice. If Vista is 70% slower than XP 9% is not much of an improvement.
Why not testing some common applications and see how they behaive. Its not uncommon that speedups in one place makes for regressions in others, especially with spaghetti code.
Its a pretty abysmal benchmark considering the source.
HTTP/1.1 400
Microsoft Windows is Dying
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You don't actually expect competence from PC World do you?
We tried running Vista and it was, on average, twice as slow as XP, so we just gave up and won't install it on any boxen in our labs.
We have real work to do and shelling out cash for graphics cards we don't need for an OS that runs even slower is a total waste of time.
Most of our boxen are now Linux-only or Linux/XP dual boot now - performance matters, and making it only 45 percent slower than XP when it was 50 percent slower won't cut it in a production environment.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Another benchmark. Man those network speeds are scarily bad compared to XP. Glad I never made the switch...
http://gizmodo.com/337768/battlemodo-windows-vista-service-pack-1-rc1-vs-shipping-vista
Question -
Response -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624
Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over older faster, more stable XP.
Damn, intelligent! Okay...
My experience with XP is building my family's machine and then living on it (I was in high school at the time). I used it for gaming, Visual Studio (C, C++ programmer), homework (Office 2003/2007), and media (Japanesian cartoons on a TV - video cards rock.) I had an Intel 3.4GHz proc with that hyperthreading magic, 1 GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6800.
XP was solid, but I had constant bluescreens when playing videogames. Replacing the videocard mostly fixed this, but my brother still reports it happening every once in a while.
My experience with Vista is building my own PC and buying the latest copy of Windows off of the shelf. Same gaming, an increased Visual Studio usage, less media. (I'm not at home to steal my parents television anymore.) I'm now running the 64-bit version of "Home Premium" on a 2.66GHz dual-core, 2GB of RAM, and an 8800GTX.
The slow file transfers bugged the hell out of me. But, the beta version of SP1 I'm using fixed that to ~XP levels. I haven't done measurements or tests or anything like that, but file copy isn't noticably different than what I'd expect from my family's computer.
Vista's media center used to crash constantly, but there was a stability update that fixed that. I installed some beta nVidia drivers to run Crysis, and those crashed occaisionally. But, the release versions didn't. My computer is on constantly so Outlook can beep at me when I should move, and hasn't bluescreened for months.
I really wonder what people do to their computers. I've used Windows 3.11 (dad's old office machine), 95 (cousin's old gaming rig), 98SE (old family computer), ME (stupid grandparents), XP (current family computer), and Vista (my gaming rig). Never had any crashes or bluescreens, other than when McAfee on the '98 box decided it wanted to rape some VxD drivers, or when Windows 3.11 would run out of memory after being left on too long. XP had crashes related to the video driver, but I suspect the case I chose was baking the videocard alive. My machine doesn't crash.
Now... why would I choose Vista over XP? My biggest reason was DirectX 10 - and the shininess was worth it, IMHO. Could they release it for XP? Probably - I heard the Vista kernel was vastly different than the XP kernel in some important ways, yadda yadda, but they probably could've still done it. But, it is pretty, does run all of my programs (Except Might and Magic 4), and I've been laughing at people who complain about their $399 Dell being slow.
You get what you pay for. Your mileage may vary. My girlfriend's parent's Vista box has been raped by Azureus, Norton (they uninstalled AVG, and then a license of Windows Live OneCare I gave them), Yahoo! install CD add-ons, and overlapping parental controls (Vista AND ISP) that keep even the admin account from sending e-mail or surfing the web.
All I can say is "Don't fuck up your computer." And don't buy one that comes pre-fucked either; it's not really a time-saver. As for your 8GB Xeon... if you don't want it, I'll take it.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Now, more than ever, I am glad that Microsoft is getting rid of that grubby XP.
Wait! DAMMIT! Fscking mirror universe!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How is this possible?
The best sales pitch for SP1 is that it COPIES FILES FASTER? Which is still probably slower than it was with XP, thus making it a non-improvement?
Ridiculous.
Was when I was talking to friend who is a Microsoft employee about considering Vista for the home network I'll be installing when I shift this month. He shook his head in a fiercely negative fashion while his mouth carefully said "I can't make any comment at all on that subject."
Given that they're one of the companies that demand their marketing people describe themselves as "Evangelists" that was a scary indication of a breakdown in religious fervour for the faithful.
I have an XP machine available at work (that I thankfully don't have to use constantly, as I have a Linux workstation). But file copying is a problem on XP, too: it's slow! Frankly, on my Linux workstation I'm regularly dealing with files over NFS that create, delete, rename, or symlink instantaneously, so how Windows can take several seconds to do these things on its *local* hard drive is beyond me. My Mac at home works fine too.
In theory, the slow-down is caused by anti-virus, backup or other random stuff that IT might have on the PC. But really, I don't care: I blame Microsoft anyway, because the extra crap interfering with basic file activities wouldn't even *be* there if the OS didn't need it all to remain even reasonably secure and reliable.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Or is WinFS not included in SP1?
The tests were not conclusive and not all that much slower than pre-SP1. IOW, they were worthless.
Anyway, the whole thing is pointless unless they compare and post XP comparison figures.
Four words, your mileage may vary, were never so true. I run a network at a tech company and we have a nice distribution of windows xp, mac, and vista computers. The XP machines are, on the whole, pretty happy little machines. Very consistent performance. The Vista machines, however, are all different. There's only one on the whole network that works just fine and rarely has problems. The rest of them all seem to have different troubles.
Really, can we stop the flamewars and the discussions and just all of us agree that Vista sucks differently on different systems? I've grown so tired of these posts on Slashdot where one person is having a horrible Vista experience and someone else claims theirs just works great and they have no complaints. Also, "it's probably something about the way you have it set up" isn't a particularly comforting answer when an operating system really should come set up properly. As in, the defaults it installs with should be the ones that will work pretty well for most people. It seems to me there's only about one in every four or so people who's completely content. The rest of us are struggling and frustrated.
The "journalist" made these awesome discoveries that there were minor differences in single trial file copying speeds of a memory card of all things. And further testing on unzipping files because that's such a core OS function.
The author didn't bother testing SMB1 vs. SMB2 copy speeds or even acknowledging that she understood there was a difference in these technologies.
I was going to make a joke about someone in my family being able to write a more authoritative article, but then I realised it wouldn't be a joke. Even my parents Jack Russel Terrier knows more about the real issues with Vista than this hack.
Can we get slashdot submitters to consider only submitting articles involving real journalism instead of a quick "Oh this looks like an anti-MS article!" kneejerk?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
If I read the article correctly, it takes 348 seconds to transfer 1.9GB of data. That amounts to 5.6 MB/sec copyspeed, or about 11.2 MB/s transfer speed on the disk (read + write). A simple, $50 SATA-II disk is able to sustain 50MB/s transfers, read or write, and quality hard disks even more. What is happening with the remaining bandwidth? There is some seek overhead, directory updates, etc but nothing that would slow it down. Also, 11MB/s is hardly a big strain for main memory, cache or PCI bus bandwidth, so it should not affect responsiveness at all. Somebody mentioned lack of rigorous benchmarking because no variance was measured. In this case, it seems many times too slow compared to the physical limit of the disk, so something is fundamentally wrong, irrespective of variance.
I quickly tested this on a SuSE linux machine, and found copy speeds of about 19 MB/sec including syncing to disk (so not tainted by buffering), or 38.2 MB/sec total disk transfer. Accounting for seek overhead, directory updates, etc, that feels like it is limited by the hardware (about 50MB/s for sequential access on this computer). Vista seems to lose about a factor of 4 relative to the hardware. Given the speed of the machine used (cpu, memory, videocard etc) any gui-aspects should not be the limiting factor. All other factors such as different filesystem etc should likewise have a negligable influence. I guess I'll stick to linux for the moment for my IO-intensive work...
Wow man and that earth shattering file copy speed was on a 3GHz dual core machine - 1000 machine cycles for each byte transferred. Does MS realize that modern tape drives have a MINIMUM speed of 32MB/s? LTO-3 tapes don't go any slower. So will MS be selling paper tape backup systems or do we need punch cards? Just thinking of what they must be doing wrong to make Vista this slow, makes my head hurt.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Doesn't it just seem *bizarre* that to this day we see filesystems in microsoft tied to rather archaic looking drive letters? Looking at his various traces and everything having an arbitrary letter to identify what filesystem it originates just seems kinda lame.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's fifteen hours in a week! In numerical computing it would very nice to get such huge speedups on long running jobs - 9% improvement is a huge amount. In desktop computing that process of copying say a 42GB file would also be noticably less painfull with a 9% speedup.
> It's easy to think of half a second as being "instant" until you've
> experienced the "Do you really want to delete this?"
It's very easy to disable...
No sig today...
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5206-10533-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=44087
He killed his laptop and couldn't use his desktop for a couple of hours.
Put identity in the browser.
Pre-SP1, the file copy averaged 384 seconds; post-SP1, the copy process showed a noticeable improvement, averaging just 348 seconds to complete the same task. That's a 9 percent improvement, a difference you're likely to notice.
Please, call me when things have improved!
Microsoft scooped up his company not long after he exposed the Sony rootkit. Funny coincidence.
we will end no whine before its time
This gist of it is that Vista is not slower at file copy than XP, XP is lying to you when it says it's done. In fact it had a bunch of async copying left to do in the background, and if you tried to eject that USB drive you're gonna be waiting about the same amt of time on both OSes.
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx
I deploy sytems and operating systems for a living -- more than 6,000 units a year. Of course I am prepared to deploy Vista, SP1 or original, should that need arise.
Not only hasn't it been asked, even the question hasn't been asked. All of my customers are looking for an excuse to avoid this version of Windows.
When they ask, of course I say "well, I use Linux" but the conversion cost for them... We will see. I the mean time they don't usually ask. They're looking for an escape from Vista and they don't get that an escape from Windows is the same thing as an escape from Vista.
XP in a virtual machine does all of the things you expect from XP, without most of the securty vulnerabilities. It makes sense to run it under a real OS like ubuntu.
I think I'll be taking a hit for admitting I use Vista but anyone who runs a HTPC understands the WAF, and she just likes MCE better than the rest. This machine has been running 2005 MCE forever so when Vista came out I picked up a copy of premium to play with and threw it on there.
It was running on there very well (not doing much other than playing xvids). It hsd some issues, like I couldn't seem to get any sort of DTS out of the spdif, wouldn't keep my speaker setup (just trying to set it as 5.1, always resets to stereo).
I waited patiently for SP1 and jumped at installing it when MS sent me the link.
Oh what a mistake, it completely killed the machine... I had to reinstall the video driver, audio driver, VFD driver... Then at least it seemed worked find. Would NOT connect to my WPA2 WAP, and Vista MCE would not start.
I am sure I have to take some of the blame for this, I had hacked the termsrv.dll so I could have two simultaneous logins (the limited TV login on the TV, and my Admin login via RDP)... and who knows what extensions I had installed into MCE to play with. Plus I had Win DVD and the Klite codec pack installed.
Of course being your normal techy who works in a support role, you get mildly excited when something huge goes wrong, and worked for an entire day attempting the normal stuff to try and back this out. Hoping I could allow the family some normal evening TV time. Nothing I did worked, it felt like a cascading failure, the more I tried to fix it, the worst it got.
Finally defeated, I resigned myself to just reinstall Vista, it's a fairly simplistic install and figured it would only take a hour or two to get reinstalled. But then Vista began to bluescreen during the install, sometime after formatting the discs.
So I threw Ubuntu on there and checked everything out to make sure all the hardware was functioning perfectly. Works great, but I could not get Vista back on the machine.
Now the PC is back running MCE2005 happily and I think I'm going to take a shot at putting Linux on the beast again (I tried Gentoo before but couldn't get the digital audio working properly over the spdif, I think this time I'll try a prepackaged HTPC distro).
The phrase "you can't polish a turd" springs to mind here!
http://www.kottke.org/98/11/
The only thing interesting about VISTA, is it proves that Microsoft's "new team" such as Dr. Russinovich and all his theories about "apply all free memory to caching" is pure b.s., & in the real world doesn't translate to superior performance as he has often stated online and in publication.
Dr. Russinovich's statement in his article is simply translating out to "for all your academia based theory, you fell on your face in the real world Mr. PHD".
He's trying to 'white wash' a failure, plain and simple (or, are the performance losses by comparison to XP mere illusion? I think, or rather know, not - & so does the rest of the planet).
Linux. More specifically in my case OpenSuse 10.2.
;)
let the flames begin.