To continue with the analogies: think hopping over to Vista as selling your old car and buying a new, gas-guzzling luxury car that you still only use to fetch beer from the local grocery store. While still obeying speed limits. And the burglar alarm keeps you up at night.

I get what you’re saying, but I think a more accurate car analogy would be to take an older car that is nearly falling apart from every angle. Then sprucing it up by redoing the interior and giving it a paint job only to find out that it falls apart the next week since the transmission blows out. The car may look nice and powerful, but if you don’t upgrade the “hardware” it will perform just as you would expect it would with what lies underneath the hood.

That would be the SuperFetch kicking in which makes use of the extra RAM that would normally sit idle. It caches the applications you frequently use in memory so that they start incredibly fast.

I’m actually running Vista on a now three-year-old system. It runs just as fast as XP did (and I’m running it with Aero, too). I’m sure if I timed things, the Vista system would be slower in some things. But to what degree? Does it take one or two seconds longer to load a file? I’m not really going to notice that. Some things, though, like loading Photoshop and Indesign, the Vista system is actually faster. Go figure. I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice a second or two here and there for all the added features of Vista, like the media center, search, and security features.

To continue with the analogies: think hopping over to Vista as selling your old car and buying a new, gas-guzzling luxury car that you still only use to fetch beer from the local grocery store. While still obeying speed limits. And the burglar alarm keeps you up at night.

I’ve read plenty of stories of people upgrading to Leopard and it being slow though. Apple also doubled the RAM requirements from Tiger to Leopard (it’s 512MB now, same as Vista), and tripled hard drive space. So obviously Leopard does require more oomph.

I’ve read stories like that too about the last version, but I also read plenty of stories about people installing an upgrade on 6-year old hardware without too much of a problem. Try that with Vista
(I am in no way a Mac fan, don’t even own one but know plenty of people who do)

Why do we need to expect that? Is OSX utilizing more resources with every new version? They manage to do more with less, why can’t Microsoft do that? I think people are accepting performance loss too easily.

I’ve read plenty of stories of people upgrading to Leopard and it being slow though. Apple also doubled the RAM requirements from Tiger to Leopard (it’s 512MB now, same as Vista), and tripled hard drive space. So obviously Leopard does require more oomph.

That’s a good point, but you almost always have to expect that a new operating system will utilize more resources than the previous versions. If it didn’t then what would be the point of getting new hardware? Tests like that don’t take into account the additional things Vista is doing in the background (indexing files for search, gather SuperFetch data, etc…).

Why do we need to expect that? Is OSX utilizing more resources with every new version? They manage to do more with less, why can’t Microsoft do that? I think people are accepting performance loss too easily.

As for the features you mentioned: of course you need better hardware for a feature like SuperFetch (more RAM), but it shouldn’t make your existing PC slower compared to using XP – SuperFetch could just be turned off or tweaked if you don’t have enough RAM for instance. As for indexing files for search – I’m using AvaFind & Copernic Desktop Search on XP and it doesn’t slow my computer at all. They seem to be even faster than the searches I’ve done in Vista..

What I’m trying to say is, Vista should not be slower than XP on the same machine – it should be automatically adapted to it and even be faster than XP when comparing the same features on both OSs.

I wonder if there are reviews that bench-marked XP to Windows 98? From what your saying Windows 98 should have been faster than XP on the same hardware.

Something I came across, which isn’t exactly an official comparison but demonstrates the point, is this forum post:
[devhood.mit.edu]

People saying that performance will definitely be poor on the 400MHz system if you’re running XP, and that the guy should stick with 98 unless he upgrades the hardware. Operating systems are obviously designed to use the resources that are currently available on the market, and not for machines that are 4 or 5 years old.

I have a ton of friends who have told me that, and when I ask why they don’t like it they always reference things that they’ve read. It’s not always best to follow the leader.

That’s a good point, but you almost always have to expect that a new operating system will utilize more resources than the previous versions. If it didn’t then what would be the point of getting new hardware? Tests like that don’t take into account the additional things Vista is doing in the background (indexing files for search, gather SuperFetch data, etc…).

Vista is doing a lot more in the background than XP ever did to make sure applications start quickly, and that searching for files is instantaneous. Obviously these features are going to utilize the resources that are available to them, but since they take extra processing power and memory usage other things are going to suffer. Obviously stuff like this is going to find its way into every new operating system, but it makes it harder to do equal comparisons of the operating systems without putting each on the recommended hardware that they were intended for.