There is little choice, at this point in time, for end users looking for a new Windows client. And it is pretty much Windows Vista or Windows XP, or taking into account the evolution of the two products, Vista SP1 and XP SP2, with XP SP3 coming down the pipe "momentarily." But at the same time, there is yet another choice available. On February 4, 2008, Microsoft released to manufacturing not only Vista SP1 but also Windows Server 2008. And it's the latest server platform from the Redmond company that can be turned into a Windows desktop super operating system, according to Vijayshinva Karnure, from Microsoft in India.

In the past, the Devil Mountain Software company revealed the results of a performance benchmarking between beta builds of Vista SP1 and XP SP3, with the third and final service pack for XP coming out on top. This time around, they threw in Vista SP1 RTM against the RTM/SP1 version of Windows Server 2008 on a Dell XPS M1710 (with a Core 2 Duo T7200 at 2GHz Processor, 2GB RAM, 80GB 7200RPM hard disk). Their conclusion, when it comes down to the performance comparison of the two operating systems, is not that favorable to Vista: "Windows 'Workstation' 2008 is the Windows Vista you've been waiting for all along."

"We were expecting to find little or no performance delta between the two platforms. So we were understandably surprised when repeated test runs showed Windows Server 2008 outperforming Windows Vista w/SP1 by a margin of 11-17%. Clearly, there is more going on within Server 2008 than simply a few boot-time kernel switches. The very tangible performance disparity between our "Workstation" 2008 configuration and Vista, even with Service Pack 1 installed, shows that Microsoft is capable of squeezing more out of the shared "Windows 6.1" code base if/when they choose to do so," revealed the Devil Mountain Software company.