No matter how powerful your machine, Vista won’t be any faster
There is some sort of rule that Windows expands in complexity to consume any new or faster resources. One of my disappointments with Vista is how sluggish it seems on a fast, dual-core machine with 2 GB of RAM. Actually, an old, much less powerful system running XP seems to have just about the same responsiveness. And XP on the newer system is quite snappy. Startup and boot times are similar for XP and Vista but various other operations are slower with Vista.
Of course, this is a qualitative impression and I haven’t gotten out a stopwatch to make a lot of quantitative measurements. Life is too short and nobody pays me to do this kind of testing. However, I am certainly not alone in this opinion; the Internet has numerous postings complaining about Vista slowness. To be fair, some of the reported problems are probably due to software that was not written for Vista or to drivers that weren’t quite ready. Also, SP1 may help some. But there is no doubt that Vista is very resource intensive. Tom’s Hardware did some benchmarking tests and the conclusion was:
Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32-bit results, and we believe it’s safe to say that users looking for more raw performance will be disappointed with Vista. Vista is the better Windows, because it behaves better, because it looks better and because it feels better. But it cannot perform better than Windows XP.
In addition to the fact that Vista is a resource hog is the disappointment that Microsoft’s promises about how Vista was going to be faster did not pan out. I quote from the Windows Vista Product Guide that came with the Beta 2 release:
New technology in Microsoft Windows Vista makes your PC significantly more responsive in performing everyday tasks. Improved Startup, Shutdown, and Sleep performance helps both desktop and mobile PCs get up and running more quickly. And Windows Vista manages both memory and I/O devices more efficiently, making the computer more responsive to user applications.
Maybe the advertising department wrote that without consulting any engineers but what it amounts to is more of Microsoft’s smoke and mirrors. ExtremeTech editor Lloyd Case has written an article, Windows Vista: Five Broken Promises, where he says he likes Vista but:
…there were several things I was really looking forward to in Vista that are simply missing in action or broken. These are features I’d really hope would improve my productivity and make life a little easier.
HA!
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Comments
[...] When I read this article today about “Vista won’t be any faster, it got me thinking. You now, I have a dual-core processor laptop with 2GB of ram. It really got me thinking, 2GB of ram is more than I’ve ever had on any computer I’ve ever owned. I work on PC’s day and night, but previous to the laptop I never had a need to have more than 512MB of ram. I mean, of course I had a need, I just never spent the $$. So the laptop has 4 times the amount of ram that my previous system had – and the only difference is that the old laptop (and my old PC) was running Windows XP Professional. Well, that and the fact that the laptop has a “dual-core” processing, a significant improvement over a single core. Windows Vista was supposed to be so much more “responsive”, and make my life so much easier. I’ve realized today that it’s just as slow as both XP systems. [...]
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No matter how powerful your machine, Vista won’t be any faster…
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