I've been trying to speed up Vista machines for customers (I've been
doing this for sometime with XP) and as a benchmark, I measure the following:
Boot time (from power on until I can see the icons in My Computer.
Time to <5% CPU utilization (from power up until the CPU utilization
drops below 5% for 10 seconds straight.)
Shutdown time (from clicking Turn Off until the computer powers off.)
Now Vista is slower than XP on all three tests on every machine I've
tried (I've even done fresh installs of XP vs fresh installs of
Vista.) Now I'm not saying Vista sucks because it boots more slowly,
but it certainly isn't a plus for the OS.
Here is the funny part. From what I've read, SP1 is supposed to
speed up Vista. But in every test I've done (five systems so far,
and one clean install) SP1 slows the first two benchmarks by from 30%
to 50%. Now I find that ridiculous. I haven't read up on SP1, so
maybe it's giving all sorts of other exciting new features and the
"better stability and performance" that MS talks about wasn't the
main purpose, but one would think that given that performance is one
of the huge complaints about Vista, MS would have tried to do
something to make it faster. (And since boot time and shutdown time
are two of the major areas that end users recognize as issues, these
would be something to look at.)
So from what I'm seeing here, SP1 is not going to save Vista.
T
