Hey, all. Yes, it's another I-hate-Vista thread. But I actually have a real question, too, so please bear with me.
When I upgraded from Windows 95 to Windows 98, Windows 98 was faster. Of course, if I ran 98 on a 486 or Pentium classic, it would be slower than 95. The same happened with Windows XP. On my old K6-II 500 with 64MB RAM, 98 was hands down a better performer than XP. But on my Athlon 950 with 512MB RAM, Windows XP was faster.
Now Vista has come, and it's slower than XP on certain hardware. No problem, right? Because with the latest hardware, Vista is actually as fast or faster, yes? Apparently not. I never quite understood how this could be the case, but after over a month of using Vista and going without XP, I can now speak with experience that Vista truly feels slower. On Vista, even the simplest, light-weight applications like Wordpad can take a few seconds to load. Larger programs like Adobe Audition and OpenOffice.org can take up to a minute. Videos freeze and stutter. Even the internet was slower!
I finally went back to XP, yesterday, and it feels truly wonderful! I never realized how much I love that OS.
Now, I'm a special case, because I was only running on 1GB RAM. Supposedly you need at least 2GB to adequately run Vista. But is that really true? Everything I read on the net seems to speak of Vista as a slower performer, even on the fastest, most souped-up systems. For example, Anand himself made this comment a few days ago, when reviewing the Eee Box:
On a side note, after using Windows XP all day on this thing I've completely forgotten how light the OS feels compared to Vista.
(source)
I don't know what kind of system Anand runs, but I would suspect his would be pretty cutting edge. Yet running XP on a compact mini PC feels faster to him!
So, what gives? Is Vista ever faster than XP?
When I upgraded from Windows 95 to Windows 98, Windows 98 was faster. Of course, if I ran 98 on a 486 or Pentium classic, it would be slower than 95. The same happened with Windows XP. On my old K6-II 500 with 64MB RAM, 98 was hands down a better performer than XP. But on my Athlon 950 with 512MB RAM, Windows XP was faster.
Now Vista has come, and it's slower than XP on certain hardware. No problem, right? Because with the latest hardware, Vista is actually as fast or faster, yes? Apparently not. I never quite understood how this could be the case, but after over a month of using Vista and going without XP, I can now speak with experience that Vista truly feels slower. On Vista, even the simplest, light-weight applications like Wordpad can take a few seconds to load. Larger programs like Adobe Audition and OpenOffice.org can take up to a minute. Videos freeze and stutter. Even the internet was slower!
I finally went back to XP, yesterday, and it feels truly wonderful! I never realized how much I love that OS.
Now, I'm a special case, because I was only running on 1GB RAM. Supposedly you need at least 2GB to adequately run Vista. But is that really true? Everything I read on the net seems to speak of Vista as a slower performer, even on the fastest, most souped-up systems. For example, Anand himself made this comment a few days ago, when reviewing the Eee Box:
On a side note, after using Windows XP all day on this thing I've completely forgotten how light the OS feels compared to Vista.
(source)
I don't know what kind of system Anand runs, but I would suspect his would be pretty cutting edge. Yet running XP on a compact mini PC feels faster to him!
So, what gives? Is Vista ever faster than XP?