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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.'"
"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.
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
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx
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
Whoa, a lot of people dont get this at all. Here's a hint.
My wife and I recently took over a business that was still using Windows 2000. I had forgotten that a Windows computer could handle email, web-browsing, and QuickBooks just fine on a 6 year old computer with 512MB of RAM.
As Mark said, there were several problems with the XP model. The biggest problem being that large file copy operations could use up all the memory in the system. There were also scenarios where there as double-caching going on.
In Vista RTM, they completely did away with most cached i/o and increased the read/write sizes. This resulted in both a real and a perceived performance penalty for some local copy scenarios, but it dramatically improved network throughput and utilization.
In Vista SP1, they went back to doing *some* cached i/o in certain scenarios. So it's basically a blended approach. They also eliminated the double caching that sometimes took place.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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...
That's really just how people have to expect to see disk drives in Windows, there's no technical limitation that prevents you from mounting drives under directories. You can use the Disk Manager control panel applet to configure the drive to mount either as a drive letter, or as a file system attached to a directory on another drive if that's what you want to do. If you come from a UNIX world, it looks strange, but most Windows poeople don't so they carry on working the way they always have.
Sure, as long as you're copying less than around 16384 files...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!