14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes down to Windows Vista the end users are judge, jury and executioner. There is little doubt about this. It is a rather unfair trial for Microsoft's latest operating system, since there are so many variables to consider when assessing the Windows client. The fact of the matter is that Vista is evaluated as an integer part of an ecosystem of hardware and software, not as an independent component. The end result that the user faces is not Vista alone but also the hardware system, the adjacent devices and the programs and applications integrated with the operating system.
Still, at this point one conclusion seems to grow to a generalized level, that Windows Vista is nowhere near Windows XP. With XP having had no less than five years to dig in its roots, and benefiting from the upgrade that was Service Pack 2, Vista indeed does not posses the advantage of user perception. In addition minor glitches and major annoyances, incompatibility issues, performance, stability, support and reliability problems all contributed to deteriorating the public opinion of Vista. As a Vista user who has been dealing with the operating system on a daily basis for almost a whole year now, and I mean the RTM version of the operating system, I can tell you that there is a lot of exaggeration surrounding Vista.
Case in point: the benchmarking that threw Vista SP1 and XP SP3 one against the other. With XP at 79% of the operating system market and Vista struggling around a share of 8%. Microsoft has all the interest to put its back into pushing the adoption of the latter. Devil Mountain Software, via the exo.blog, has published the result of several Office 2003 and 2007 benchmarking tests involving Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3, with a Dell XPS M1710 system w/2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and DDR-2 667MHz RAM, as an arena. The only thing that changed was the amount of RAM, varying from 1 GB to 2 GB.
Vista SP1 was simply crucified as being no less than two times slower than XP SP3. But is it not in fact too early to crucify Vista SP1 and to put XP SP3 on a pedestal? Sure, the tests do give end users a taste of what the final service packs will do for them, but SP1 is now just a preview of the Release Candidate, while XP SP3 managed to reach RC stage. Neither product is anywhere near its finalization, and as such maybe drawing the line on either one is a move similar to jumping to conclusions ahead of time.