C|NET: XP SP3b vs. VISTA SP1b

[Jammrock]

Vista is still a POS, and probably will be even with SP1. Perfect example: Got a new laptop at work, supposedly fully Vista compliant with enough memory and dual core Centrino etc. It is sluggish at doing anything and takes forever to boot and shutdown. Formatted and put XP SP2 on, and its now its nice and fast at everything that sucked on Vista.

XP SP3 will just make the performance gap even wider.

Yes well, everyone complained about XP performance when it first came out too. Now that it has had 5 years to mature it is a pretty fast OS on modern hardware. Vista is a PITA for sure though, but once you tame it it's pretty slick.

[Dr Mordrid]

I don't want slick, I want speed and stability and Vista offers neigther with no change in sight based on the service pack comparisons.

[Taz]

Yes well, everyone complained about XP performance when it first came out too. Now that it has had 5 years to mature it is a pretty fast OS on modern hardware.

But is that due to improvements in XP or the fact that people are running it on better hardware

[Nowhere]

Well, I'm running it on 6 year old CPU, Athlon XP 1700+. Yep, plenty fast... (ok, actually not XP buy 2k3, but that's virtually the same)

Ans actually I don't recall complains about performance of XP (other things, like problems with drivers (stability) and some programs breaking), it was plenty fast on hardware that was current then, on par (supposedly faster in games) with 2k, just more memory hungry...

[Sasq]

ok, we installed vista biz in the office for testing out products against vista.
we didn't really and haven't really played too much with the 'greater' functions in vista - mostly because even though we are a programming shop, people here tend to specialize, and I am the go-to guy for OS issues (and our vista install is in Japanese, if I am going to play I at least want it in my native language)

we installed it, me and a co-worker who inherited my old ibook sat down for a play.
for 10 mins as we were going through the more obvious changes to it, (the UI stuff, search stuff etc) all I heard from my co-worker was 'thats just like osx, but crappy'

so far with my limited exposure to vista, all i can see is a poor knock off of some of the nicer new featers in osx - and even to an extent desktop linux.

now to my point, personally i think vista is a pile of sh*te, not because the people who code over at redmond can't code, i think they have some damn fine people there, but because the sales department wrote cheques their asses couldn't cash, the code people were micromanaged to death, and the resulting product shows it.

Vista could have been a fantastic product had they released it when it was actually baked, as it stands they released an OS that no one wants because of some 'sales/marketing' timeline that said they had to release a new OS.

IMHO, they should have just released a heavy duty SP for XP that would have caught it up to new hardware, and kept vista on the fire to get a damn fine OS.

Yes, i use osx, I have used osx for over 3 years as my primary/only OS, I don't miss windows, but my life involves java and dealing with linux servers, for many people XP is a good choice, apart from the security gripes we all have, the OS is a perfect fit for most people at the moment. Longhorn had fantastic potential, the problem is marketing had more say then r&d - a problem all of us who have coded, or do code understants.

[UtwigMU]

So far only one business customer went with Vista, it's a one man shop who bought a laptop.

We make money by downgrading people's macines to XP. Most have brought back their Vista laptops for XP downgrade. I will have to start playing with Vista for job reasons but I need quite powerful box. I could put it on my T42p but I need that as it is. Work issued HP laptop is not powerful enough, I will probably get something like HP dx7400 with quad core.

It's totally different animal from XP. There's no more boot.ini, you have to use easyBCD to edit boot options.