Vista is buggy. That much is obvious to anyone who runs it but it has been improving in stability as the patches are rolled out. However it runs extremely slowly too and this became startlingly obvious to me in the last few weeks as I have been testing browsers on different platforms.
It turns out I can run Internet Explorer 8 faster on my older Mac than I can on my newer Vista machine (both 2ghz Intel core duo with 2gb ram)!
When I ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark tests on IE8, it completed the test in 9.9 seconds on my Mac (running XP in Parallels).
However, when I installed Internet Explorer 8 on my Vista laptop, IE8 completed the test in 19,906.4ms.
Vista is more than twice as slow as XP running in Parallels on my Mac.
Vista is a huge embarrassment for Microsoft. They spent a fortune developing it and you speak to any Microsoft employee now and if the topic turns to Vista they get visibly uncomfortable. To the extent that Microsoft are now starting to talk up Windows 7 with Bill Gates calling it a big step forward. It needs to be.
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I think Vista is great. It allows you to do whatever you need in the best possible way.
Hi Tom,
Funnily enough, I quite like Vista. It’s so much better than XP from a user experience perspective, and I haven’t had many issues with stability or performance either.
A couple of my old peripherals became obsolete because there wasn’t any driver support, but that’s about it, and I guess that’s to be expected with any OS update. I’ve been running it for 10 months now, and haven’t really had any stability or performance issues worth talking about.
I guess when you run benchmarking software the performance differential becomes glaringly obvious, but for day to day usage with 2GB of RAM on a 1.8 GHz Core2 Duo I don’t find it noticable at all. Of course other people’s milage will vary considerably.
Tom, my experience is pretty much the same as yours. I do love Vista from a user point of view but only because I’m running it on anew whizzy machine. I know that as the machine gets progressively clogged up over the years, it’s going to be get very slow.
I guess I’m a luddite. Still running Windows 2000 at home and very very happy with it. I use XP at work, and its hard to put a finger on it, but everyday OS things just seem slower / harder / to take more time. Could be just my mindset though. I hope to never have to use Vista. It looks awful and theres been far too many horror stories about it.
I agree my mum got a vista laptop over nt advice and its stupidly slow and all of the vista features just work against the system. We dont need random things moving in our window bar or a micro soft presentation fly in window. Theyve finally sent out the update so hopfully it will solve some of her problems.
I didnt like Vista’s performance at all
Tom,
What is the most efficient way to increase the speed up my Vista PC? I recently converted from XP to Vista and so far, it hasn’t been a smooth transition.
I’ve been doing some research on ways to speed up my PC and came across a site that says they have software that can help me out. Their top product is called RegCure, but I know nothing about it. Here is the site: http://www.pc-registry-repair.com
Thanks
-Jason
Jason,
avoid RegCure like the plague – it is NastyWare. See http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/regcure-c4155.html for more.
The best way to speed up your system is to uninstall Vista and install XP, or if you can, add more RAM. Lots more RAM. 4gb is prob sufficient. More if you can.
Hi Tom,
I think that is the route I will end up going. Never had problems with the trusty XP. Silly me thought Vista would be the next great OS…
-Jason
Actually, I liked Windows Vista when I installed it on my PC. In the end though, it still slowed down my productivity because I use a lot of OTHER software, and these apps didn’t work with Vista. In the end, I got so frustrtated I just rolled back to Windows XP.
We are an IT company and in the past we always recommended the latest version of Windows to our customers. — With Vista things are different and because of poor performance we recommend our customers to stay with Windows XP as long as possible.
Vista looks and feels great on desktop systems with fast hard disks as long as you have only a minimum of applications installed. ie. as an internet kiosk to surf the net, chat etc.
For power users with lots of applications on their system the OS becomes so slow that its not possible to do the daily work. Our laptops are 2.4 GHz Dual Core, 2 or 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD and we had to roll back multiple consultant laptops because it was unbearable for them to work with Vista.