While some bloggers debate Vista’s benchmark results for areas where Microsoft claims to have improved performance with SP1, Randall Kennedy re-joins the conversation with a reminder that, when it comes to productivity applications, services, multimedia tasks, among others, “Vista is an absolute dog compared to XP.” Kennedy explains in Vista is still slower than XP that while Vista does perform “quite tolerably” on today’s state-of-the-art hardware, XP SP3 “absolutely screams” on high-end, multi-core machines. “When you finally do give in and buy that new ‘Designed for Vista’ PC, do yourself a favor and provision yourself a small XP partition, just as an experiment. Don’t settle for Vista until you’ve seen how much performance you’re trading…” Software Development