Vista SP1 a Performance “Dud?”

Heads-up, Windows fans. I’ve got some bad news. You know all those nagging performance issues that have been plaguing Windows Vista since it went RTM last fall? Well, it looks like they’re with us to stay. My colleagues over at the exo.performance.network (www.xpnet.com) have published some preliminary benchmarking numbers for Vista SP1, and the results are not encouraging. Here’s the link to the their blog site:

exo-blog.blogspot.com

There’s a lot of meat in there, including performance numbers for Office 2007 and some complex multitasking workloads. As for the conclusion, to quote the exo-blog: “Vista + SP1 is no faster than Vista from the RTM image.”

This, of course, will come as a disappointment for those of us who were hoping for some relief. As these same folks point out in another exo-blog post, exhaustive testing confirms that Windows Vista is at least twice as slow as Windows XP when running on the same hardware. So it’s doubly painful to learn that the rumored performance tweaks Microsoft has been hinting at for SP1 simply “never materialized.”

Bottom Line: Vista’s performance is what it is, so “get used to it.”

Note: While you’re checking out the exo-blog, don’t forget to drop by the main www.xpnet.com web site. As their home page describes it, the “exo.performance.network is a global, community-based effort to gather real-world metrics data from Windows-based systems and to analyze that data to extract common threads of knowledge and information.”

It’s a mouthful, but it also seems like a noble goal. They’re actively looking for people or organizations that are willing to contribute metrics data to the “exo.repository” and thus help them build what will ultimately become a representative sampling of the global Windows community.

I’ve got several systems hooked-into the site right now. It’s free, requires only a small (500KB) agent download, and in return you get access to some cool tools (including Clarity Studio) and analysis templates for conducting your own real-world performance studies and monitoring projects.

Maybe it’s all that time I spent in Ubuntu, by I find I’m now a sucker for any cause that makes me feel like I’m contributing towards the betterment of my fellow IT users. I’d encourage other like-minded souls to hook-up one or more representative systems to the exo.performance.network. Let’s help these folks build-up the kind of independent knowledge-base that will one day lead us all to a better understanding of how Windows works in the real-world.