I won’t bore you with all the details of a recent XP-vs-Vista benchmarking test except to say that it involved Office 2007 productivity tasks, XP with Service Pack 3 Beta, and Vista with Service Pack 1 Beta. XP whipped through the test in 35 seconds, while Vista took 80 seconds. Both tests were run on a Dell 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM.
I will tell you what Microsoft representatives had to say about the results of the test.
One of them pointed to the fact that the service packs aren’t finished yet and will get better before their respective releases. Okay fine, you can use that excuse for now but Vista’s got a lot of catching up to do and most of what I’ve been reading alludes to the idea that this first service pack isn’t going to really improve everything as much as Microsoft might have us all believe.
This next quote, however, gives me aggravation. In light of the fact that only about 13 percent of business are using Vista, Microsoft’s corporate vice president Mike Sievert said, "Frankly, the world wasn’t 100 percent ready for Windows Vista."
Is this guy serious? The world wasn’t ready for Vista? What about Vista not being ready for the world? It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked correctly for a year now. There’s been plenty of spin coming out of Redmond about Vista’s "features" but I can’t remember one that insulted everyone’s intelligence as much as this one does. The world wasn’t ready…come on, man.
I seem to sometimes forget that Windows XP didn’t really start cruising until Service Pack 2. I honestly can’t remember much before Service Pack 1 except for the feeling that SP1 made it work well enough that most of the major annoyances had subsided and then when SP2 came along, almost everything seemed to get much, much better. I suppose I should expect the same from Vista but I guess I just assumed that it would be an improvement over XP right out of the gate and then have the kinks worked out along the way.