Re: In Case Anyone's Considering Vista...

[Paul Lagasse pglagasse@xxxxxxxx]

Patricia wrote:

Was that Vista out of the box
(with Aero and all the other eye-candy turned
on)?


I wondered the same thing, since (although I don't have it) I've seen it
run reasonably on what now passes for an average machine when the
eye-candy was degraded; it did not appear to be slower than my XP
desktop.


At
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/60491.html; eudora="autourl">
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/60491.html they have a somewhat
more complete article, which includes the following comment:


Few people will notice the performance difference, especially while
running Microsoft Office, said Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst
of J. Gold Associates.

"I'm not all that surprised or shocked," said Gold. "Vista
is a relatively new piece of software while XP is six years old, or
something like that. I would hope that, in six years, Microsoft would
learn how to optimize something they'd written."

Even without Devil Mountain's findings, most enterprises are seeing
"no compelling reasons" to upgrade to Vista their systems that
are running perfectly well on XP, said Gold. "This is not a major
gotcha," he said. "If it was a security flaw they discovered,
one where people could get into the operating system, that's one thing.
But if it just says, 'XP runs faster,' then who cares?"


Another site
(http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203975; eudora="autourl">
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203975
) reports:


Devil Mountain researchers ran a mix of tests comparing existing versions
of the operating systems -- the original Vista and XP SP2 -- and versions
that had been patched with the latest updates -- Vista SP1 beta and XP
SP3 beta. Tests were also run on machines with 1 Gbyte and 2 Gbytes of
memory.

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests -- regardless of the
versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer. In fact,
XP proved to be roughly twice as fast as Vista in most of the tests.

For instance, notebooks running Vista SP1 took more than 80 seconds to
complete a series of Office tasks in the OfficeBench test suite, while
notebooks running Windows XP SP2 completed the tasks in just over 40
seconds.


Real details about how Vista was configured seem to be hard to come by,
but the source of all the noise is
http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/; eudora="autourl">
http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/.


And I never know how real-world any of these tests are, given, for
example, that after all these years I'm still an inefficient typist. What
happens if I carry out one of these 40 second tasks? Tamedos definitely
improves how I can work in XyWrite in many respects, but it slows down
some of my XPL programs. I notice the speed loss in the latter, but they
can run while I go get a cup of coffee.


Paul



Paul Lagasse

PO Box 144

Kemblesville, PA 19347

pglagasse@xxxxxxxx


Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. -- The Borg

Cooperate with the inevitable. -- Dale Carnegie