One of the complaints about Windows Vista, besides lack of compatibility, lack of drivers --- should I continue? --- has
been speed. Or rather, should I say, the lack thereof. There have been hints about Windows Vista SP1 being faster, but testing of the release candidate version didn''t show great results.
Devil Mountain Software compare that RC build against the released build that Microsoft started selling in January --- without any patches or updates --- just the bare original software out of the box, so to speak. In their
tests, they saw only a 1 - 2% increase in any benchmark.
There were two types of tests run: one was a Microsoft Office-based
test script, and another a test panel multitasking on the computer. The computer was a laptop with a dual-core CPU, integrated graphics and 1 or 2 GB of RAM. With either 1 or 2 GB of RAM, the results were disappointingly the same.
So what does this say about Vista SP1? It basically says that has not fixed the issues related to speed on the operating system, but it also possibly confirms what many already say: it''s a resource hog and bloated.
Perhaps skipping this OS, as some companies are rumored to be considering, is not such a bad idea after all. Except for DirectX 10, blast it!