14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Vista represents an inherent invitation at an operating system measuring contest. And as far as Microsoft products go, Vista will ultimately be compared with Windows XP. Setting the two operating systems side by side on the same hardware configuration will permit users to take into account not only the added features, functionality and capabilities of the latest Windows client, but also to judge the contrast between the performance, reliability, stability, compatibility and support of the two platforms.
If 2007 made one thing painfully clear for Microsoft, then it is the fact that the company has missed its Wow target by a long shot. Users reported a plethora of issues affecting Windows Vista, from incompatibility to lack of support, and from inefficient hardware resource management to poor performance. But believe it or not, these problems are quite generalized, and they can affect even Microsoft employees. A bad Windows eXPerience is at the opposite spectrum of the promised Wow. But downgrading, or going back to Windows XP from Vista is not always the best course of actions.
Memi Lavi, an architect in the MCS group in Microsoft Israel, experienced major performance problems when he switched to Vista. "I tried everything, including some angry internal mails.to no avail. But then, while doing some routine maintenance, one of our OTG guys told me I had a major problem with my hard drive. It's not that the HD had a defect. It was simply not built for the high speeds Vista required. He told me also that this HD is no longer sold together with the laptop I'm using, and there is a new one", Lavi revealed.
Recently, even Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates confessed that he wished the Redmond company would had polished Windows Vista better, before they shipped the operating system. Currently, Vista users have the latest Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate Refresh available, and the full service pack just around the corner. Vista is bound to get better with SP1, unless, of course, your problems are hardware related.
"The day after my HD was replaced with a new, shiny one and voila - all the problems have gone! As simple as that. My HD is no longer revving itself to death, applications start instantly, startup time had degraded from 10 minutes to less than 2 minutes, and so on. Actually, I showed these performance to some XP fanatics I know, and they were really overwhelmed", Lavi added.