By Suzanne Tindal, 28 November 2007 08:46
NEWS
New tests have revealed XP with the beta SP3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with the newer OS' long-awaited SP1.
Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the SP1 beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Devil Mountain Software the improvement was not overwhelming - leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.
Vista: all the coverage...
♦
Vista - when will business take the plunge?
♦
Gates: Vista selling faster than XP
♦
Tesco.com takes stock with Windows Vista
♦
CIO Jury: IT chiefs not yet planning for Windows Vista
♦
Blighty Vista "overcharging" attacked
Vista, both with and without SP1, performed more than two times slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking more than 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta-SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds.
Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than two per cent compared to performance without SP1 - much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 per cent.
The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentations materials.
In response to the test, a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, although the company understood the interest in the service packs, they are "still in development" and will continue to evolve before their release. It said: "It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs."
If SP1 does not evolve sufficiently, it could be another setback for Vista, with many businesses waiting to adopt the operating system until the service pack is released.
One year after its launch, only 13 per cent of businesses have adopted Vista, according to a survey of IT professionals.
Microsoft admits that the launch has not run as well as it would have liked. Mike Sievert, corporate vice president of Microsoft, said in a recent interview: "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 per cent ready for Windows Vista."
XP has proved to be more popular than its younger sibling, with the first six months of US retail sales of box copies of Vista 59.7 per cent below those of XP's in the equivalent period after its release.
Microsoft has had to allow PC manufacturers to continue to sell XP on new PCs, setting a deadline for the last sale at 31 January next year. However, the pressure from manufacturers and consumers has been so great Microsoft has been forced to increase the deadline for another five months until June.
According to Microsoft, sales of Vista have been picking up, with the software giant reporting 88 million units sold.
Suzanne Tindal writes for ZDNet Australia, Ina Fried at CNET News.com contributed to this article.
Comments
There are 11 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
percieved benefits of vista - marginal given XP does 99.9% of what vista can do
percieved cost of vista - in excess of £200 a seat for the all singing all dancing version, and lets face it whats the point in buying anything else
making a business case for upgrade given these trifling details is going to be an uphill struggle, especially if the MD has a copy and is not one of the small percentage who have had no problems with it
2. anonymous
Just because Microsoft says that Vista purchases are increasing, companies like ourselves with volume licencing agreements are buying Vista OEM licences with new machines, but are downgrading these to XP - so these figures don't mean that much.
I have one of our test Vista machines and it is far from stable, slow to browse file shares and still incompatible with various software. I have been locked out from my machine as an 'illegal copy' three times so far, each resolving itself after a couple of reboots - I now run a virtual XP on it for compatibility reasons. Our plans to role our Vista are firmly on hold at the moment.
3. Mike Street
Mike Sievert, corporate vice president of Microsoft, said in a recent interview: "Frankly, the world wasn't 100 per cent ready for Windows Vista."
I think he has it backwards.
4. Graham Coles
They're definitely selling Vista. I've even seen the odd new machine at work come in with a 'vista business' labelon it ....
... of course, it's been reformatted with XP Pro, but it still counts as a vista sale!
5. Stuart Wilson
I've been running Vista on a Core 2 duo for about 3 months now on a Lenovo T61 Thinkpad and can honestly say it has damaged my productivity in some way, almost every single day since I've had it.
It doesn't remember LAN & Wireless network settings reliably and even requires a reboot to get them going again, the screen res' changes almost every time I join a different network, I get blue screen's intermittently and above all else, it is so painfully slow to work with compared to XP. Boot up takes too long and often slows down so much you end up forcing power down and re-booting. I can spend between 10 and 45 minutes each day trying to get it booted up and ready for work.
It runs about 97 processes by default (compared to XP which was running just over 40), so I've had to reduce some of these manually (which is a bit risky if you're not sure what you're doing).
All this, despite installing every known patch and bios update currently available.
It has some good features but they don't all work correctly all of the time and it's not enough to stop me from ditching it and re-installing XP at the weekend.
6. Matt Horwell
If I had my way I'd go back to Windows 3.11... at least I knew what drivers and software I needed instead of needing a huge HDD and RAM in order to run the Aero display which now seems quite unnecessary!
7. Andrew Robb
If I could downgrade Vista Home Premium to XP Home, my new laptop might still be running Windows rather than Linux. Even if Vista would dual-boot through GRUB, I might have kept it on.
So Microsoft have sold a copy of Vista to me - but I don't want them to include me in their sales figures.
8. Jonathan Lupton
Further to Mike Street's comment, what arrogance on the part of Microsoft and Mike Sievert to think that the world has to get itself ready for Vista. Computers are supposed to be our servants, not the other way round!
9. W.S.Becket
Of course my firm is not going over to Vista. Why? Because Vista will not run software that is more than a few months old and we should therefore have to upgrade every piece of software in the business.
If MS think we are going to this expense just to keep them happy, they have backed a lame horse.
We shall stick to XP for the forseeable future.
10. anonymous
I provide IT support to a number of small businesses - only one has adopted Vista (against my advice) and has suffered the consequences of compatibility problems. I haven't said "I told you so" yet!
11. d bonwick
i have just installed vista after having xp- this vista is rubbish and causes so many problems-i have had to ask for a recover disc to repair my pc its that bad-im going back to xp-my new printer wont work with vista nor will aol software