Microsoft Windows Vista: How much memory is enough?

[Sharktooth]

PC Stats analyzed Windows Vista's memory usage in various applications.
The conclusion is... here (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2163)

[Dr.Khron]

Good article.
Sounds like the requirements from XP to Vista have basically doubled... IE XP's 1 GB = Vista's 2 GB.

Anandtech published a series of articles describing the differences in memory addressing between XP and Vista, specifically how some games can use up all the address space and crash. Good read, I'd never really understood how virtual addresses work before i read it.

http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3034

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3044

http://anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060

[Sharktooth]

the address space thing is going to be fixed soon (or maybe it has just been fixed) but the problem will become more serious when videogames will exploit the full potentialities of DX10. at that point 2GB wont be enough and the approach to the 3.5GB limit is a big problem for the 32bit versions.

[check]

Some motherboards can 'fix' the memory hole issue on 64bit OSes. Normally, you will still have the memory holes in the same physical location on a 64bit OS, to increase backwards compatibility. That means you'll lost the same amount of RAM, even though you don't need to.
What some clever motherboards (mine apparently included) can do is to actually remap the 'lost' memory up to a higher address, thereby letting you use all your RAM.
I guess it's still a workaround, but nobody will ever use 64bit of memory address space anyway :)(you may not quote this line in any year after 2012)

[Doobie]

I upgraded to XP for the stability vs. Win9x.

I'm not going to Vista until I'm forced to. I see no benefit in it and I prefer a highly responsive computer than a sluggish computer.

[Sharktooth]

(you may not quote this line in any year after 2012)
IMHO it will be much earlier...

[LANjackal]

I run Vista Home Premium quite capably on 1GB of RAM.

[Sharktooth]

even 4GB is not going to be enough...
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=129412
at least for games.

[burfadel]

If you want to use 4GB of ram, or more, you have to use Vista 64 bit. A lot of people try and run 4gb of ram on Vista 32, then complain that they're missing a lot of memory.

Its true Vista uses more memory currently, but its still be improved. At some point in the future, it will actually be beneficial performance wise with hardware etc to run Vista over XP!

[Sharktooth]

i dont think so. more bl0at = more wasted resources.
also Vista64 is more restrictive than the 32bits version (DRM and stuff)... and eats even more memory.
however i switched to linux (and will keep XP on the other box until it dies), so that's not my problem. i just wish ppl understand the 32bits OSes are very SOON going to be replaced by 64bits ones. sooner than what they can imagine...

[deets]

i had to upgrade from 1gb to 2gb on my system as the disk was constantly being accessed.

I cannot work out a single reason why anyone would upgrade to vista over XP

[HyperHacker]

i had to upgrade from 1gb to 2gb on my system as the disk was constantly being accessed.

I cannot work out a single reason why anyone would upgrade to vista over XPIt's new and it's pretty and they don't know any better. As far as they know, the "new" features that Mac and Linux have had for ages really are new. (Not saying Mac/Linux have had all of Vista's "new" features for ages, but there are a few.)

Even XP64 isn't that great. I ended up having to go with XP32 on my 64-bit laptop. Though I intend to install Ubuntu on it one of these days (if I ever get around to it) and see how that goes, because I'm pretty sick of XP and I'm sure as hell not "upgrading" to Vista.

[foxyshadis]

What's bloat to one person is a long-missing feature to another. You can strip XP to run comfortably in 32 mb ram, I've done it, but you lose so much functionality that it's just not worth it to me. (I get the same feeling going back to 98.) nLite for Vista exists - you want the OS and not the bloat, go customize it yourself, the default is there for people who have no idea how to customize anything.

The 16->32 transition was painful, the 32->64 has been painful, but hopefully in two or three years it'll all just be a bad memory.

[Nematocyst]

The 16->32 transition was painful, the 32->64 has been painful, but hopefully in two or three years it'll all just be a bad memory.

Perhaps. I remember the 16->32 transition being relatively smooth. But the situation was rather different then. Most of the hardware that existed was already 32bit capable, and the limits of 16bit were being heavily strained. The move to 32 bits was mostly welcomed by developers because a flat addressing model was so superior to all the hacks used in the 16 bit world.

Today, there is little need for 64 bit systems by average users or even developers. There aren't any pressing problems that 64 bit systems solve, and there are vast numbers of 32 bit systems that do everything their users need. It is true that *some* applications benefit greatly by the 32->64 bit move. But the situation is nowhere near as necessary as the 16->32 bit move.

[Shinigami-Sama]

Today, there is little need for 64 bit systems by average users or even developers. There aren't any pressing problems that 64 bit systems solve, and there are vast numbers of 32 bit systems that do everything their users need. It is true that *some* applications benefit greatly by the 32->64 bit move. But the situation is nowhere near as necessary as the 16->32 bit move.

what about email servers?
MS Exchange is already at the limit, as well other email servers
rendering as well
also high end photo work is getting close

on the consumer side I agree, we don't need it yet - but an once of prevention is better than a pound of cure no?

[JohnnyMalaria]

at that point 2GB wont be enough and the approach to the 3.5GB limit is a big problem for the 32bit versions.

Eh? What 3.5GB limit? Default Windows Workstation installations since W2K support 2GB for a real mode process and 2GB for kernel mode processes (less memory-mapped hardware resources).

3GB real mode is possible via the boot /3GB switch but only if applications are explicity written to be aware of the /3GB. The switch changes the kernel mode base address from 0x80000000 to 0xC0000000. Typically, that's a crap shoot - history tells us of many disasters including supposedly noble products like Adobe Premiere and Autocad. Very often, users of those (and their ilk) with the /3GB can't run "normal" applications without something breaking something else. /3GB aware apps can also wreak havoc on a non /3GB system if sloppy programming is afoot (highly likely).

If you want multi GB games, you need a 64-bit OS. And since serious gamers have 64-bit processors along with both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Vista on the Vista installation DVD, what's the problem?

[Sharktooth]

The problem is not the 32bit->64bit transition. The problem lies in the Vista 64bit OS.
There are more strict limitations on certified drivers, supported hardware, DRM (IIRC hdmi is mandatory on 64bit vista to watch HD DRMed content), etc that will be a real pain.

[JohnnyMalaria]

True - but the gaming software houses make gobs of money to be at the cutting edge. Can't really be sympathetic with them.

[noclip]

Vista will find a use for literally all the memory you give it. Even if you have the 64-bit version with 32GB of RAM it will still find something to dump into memory (in the case of 32GB, the entire OS).

[sportcenter]

recommend at least 2Gb to actually enjoy all the graphics and visualizations vista has to offer

[Bathrone]

I have 2GB on Vista, along with the dx memory address hotfix and it plays any game I have ever tried to fine.

Vista is far better at memory management and caching than XP.

Too many clueless users think cos all they see as different is Aero they dont need it. Superfetch, service hardening, the windows server 2008 kernel (in the sp1 beta) and countless other features actually make it more snappy and responsive than XP from a user point of view and the additional security over XP is substantial. Things like the 80% prioritisation of multimedia on initial process startup on the kernel make it just more responsive.

Yes there is more DRM but what do you expect? Too many cowboys on this forum who break the law. MS had the choice to other comply with the IP owners / patent pools or simply not implement it. MS would have been in court quicker than Osama Bin Laden should it have breached IP owners rights in their software.

And most of you know Slysoft has the solution for those who cant live with it.

[Sharktooth]

hotfixes... hotfixes... hotfixes.
all i recently heard about vista are hotfixes...
that OS is buggy as hell, filled with crap and bloats and INSECURE at least the same level as XP.
it only makes you "feel" more secure but the real thing is Vista is plagued by serious (and critical) vulnerabilities and bugs... same story as XP (advertized as "the most secure OS Micro$oft made").
Also i have my doubts vista with 1GB is more responsive than XP with the same amount of RAM...
it's a half-assed OS rushed into the market to say "we did it!" while it was (and still is) buggy, incomplete and bloated.

[Bathrone]

Your claims are factually incorrect Sharktooth.

If you compare the number of hotfixes released from say XP, Red Hat Linux Enterprise and Mac OS X you actually see the least hotfixes released by MS for Vista out of all of them.

To claim that Vista is atleast as insecure as XP is really just demonstrating your ignorance of the issues at hand in all honesty. Go and read up from someone qualified on the subject such as book written by Roger Grimes that discussed in details the very real security enhancements in Vista.

Again, if you actually took the time to get over your bias and irrational thinking and actually compare the number of security issues (both unpatched and patched) with Vista against XP, MacOSx and common Linux distros you'd find quite an interesting result.

These things said I very much respect what you do for the video community here at doom9. Thankyou.

[Sharktooth]

well, look at the number of fixes in Vista SP1 ... oh wait... SP1 is not even final and Vista is less than 1 year old...
my thought is Vista was released as an unfinished product. people struggled with its bugs and even after applying the SP1 there will still be tons of bugs...

[foxyshadis]

NT4, 2K, and XP all had similar shakeout problems initially, with tons of patches and service packs. It's too early to say whether Vista will suffer the same sort of total system cracking leading to megaworms that 2K and XP did in their early years, but so far it doesn't really look it. Compare:

http://secunia.com/product/13223/?task=advisories_2007 Vista advisories YTD.
http://secunia.com/product/22/?task=advisories_2007 XP advisories YTD - much higher, more than double.
http://secunia.com/product/22/?task=advisories_2002 3-month snapshot of XP in Q4 2002. There were many more but secunia doesn't go that far back.

What looks more secure?

Also, if you want to compare SP1s, look at how hueg XP's and 2K's were, and how quickly they followed after release. XP's was released in only 9 months, 2000's in only 7. Stop making it out to be something terribly unusual for microsoft. (Although it certainly doesn't show off the kind of confidence they're trying to project in their new processes.)

[Sharktooth]

maybe you should read more invisible things (http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/)...
expecially this one (http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2007/02/vista-security-model-big-joke.html)

[foxyshadis]

I do, it's a good secondary source for security discussion, and she's very intelligent, but has a habit of believing that the application of enough technology can solve social engineering.

All kinds of people complain about Vista breaking their favorite applications in the same breath that they complain about it not being secure enough. As a business, Microsoft is forced to do its best to let people have their cake while they demand to eat it, too - people just plain won't buy if it's too secure, and then 5 years will be wasted while we're stuck with XP. The transition has already proved that major vendors won't make an effort to make their products compatible with a new OS until people are actually using it and raising hell. (If security an stability were all that mattered, people would have dropped 98 for Windows 2000 immediately, but it took tons of hacks for old applications in XP to make the switch make sense.)

[wmansir]

I have 1GB on Vista and it's fine for general usage, but I think 2GB would have a significant benefit for the more demanding tasks I do like encoding, video editing, Photoshop, etc. and of course games.

I cannot work out a single reason why anyone would upgrade to vista over XP

That's a bit of an overstatment, IMO. While I agree it's generally not a worthwhile upgrade there are a few things I would miss if I went back to XP.

The single biggest one is per-application volume control. For me it is really a godsend. I always have Firefox muted, so now I never have to worry about stupid flash ads or background music annoying the hell out of me.

And Vista is smart enough to remember settings for individual programs, so I can set DVD Decrypter to 5% volume and not have to worry about the job "success" wav sending me into cardiac arrest. That was such an annoyance on XP I eventually edited the default .wav file to reduce the volume, which isn't even an option on most programs.

[Bathrone]

The discussion the lady has on UAC really isnt very fair. MS has to balance security vs usability. The 60 million plus people using Vista arent all Unix command line veterans. IMHO UAC is a good balance between low privileged modes of general operation and "the hassle" of security restrictions. Its far better than the common XP style of everyone being admin.

The fact is that Vista is the first MS OS out the door using their secure software development lifecycle. That methodology has delivered too - it has less security patches than common Linux distros or MacOSX in the same time period. Same with the number of unpatched security flaws that have a critical rating.

Recently I tried Ubuntu for something new and having spent professional time on various *nix servers I was appalled at how buggy feisty fawn indeed is in comparison to Vista. The Linux kernel is great but the remaining other software to make it a polished desktop OS simply isnt mature. Unlike the *nix zealots, atleast the MacOSX zealots who try to rubbish MS have a good desktop OS to compare too - it has taken the strengths of *nix and polished it into a nice user experience. MacOSX is good. The problem is the limited hardware it can run on from the closed sales model that Apple have with it.

[Inventive Software]

Regarding the need for 64-bit OSs, the only real-world application I can see any feasible use for it is RAM, and even then, it's only really servers that'd benefit from that much. Though with the HD encoding scene and AviSynth asking a lot of memory, perhaps that's one consumer use. ;)

[deets]

I have 1GB on Vista and it's fine for general usage, but I think 2GB would have a significant benefit for the more demanding tasks I do like encoding, video editing, Photoshop, etc. and of course games.



That's a bit of an overstatment, IMO. While I agree it's generally not a worthwhile upgrade there are a few things I would miss if I went back to XP.

The single biggest one is per-application volume control. For me it is really a godsend. I always have Firefox muted, so now I never have to worry about stupid flash ads or background music annoying the hell out of me.

And Vista is smart enough to remember settings for individual programs, so I can set DVD Decrypter to 5% volume and not have to worry about the job "success" wav sending me into cardiac arrest. That was such an annoyance on XP I eventually edited the default .wav file to reduce the volume, which isn't even an option on most programs.


yep, i didn't know you could do that and i know exactly what you mean about the simpsons tune blaring out :P

I just paid 60 quid for vista OEM which is only a little more than XP OEM so thats the main reasons i went for vista.

I dont think vista is actually that bad, but i dont think its that good either. Im writing this on XP and have vista on the htpc which i had to put 2gb of ram in to get it to run as smoothly as my laptop!

Im sure in 6-12 months when vista is patched up nicely and hardware prices have come down and specs gone up for the same relative price, vista will be a more worthy choice.

What i will say, avoid like the plague for laptops unless you have a really top end system or just want to use vista basic (then why not just use XP!).

one thing i do like, the tick boxes to select files, v.handy :) oh and the bubbles screensaver, but you can get that for xp as well ;)

[Sharktooth]

The discussion the lady has on UAC really isnt very fair. MS has to balance security vs usability. The 60 million plus people using Vista arent all Unix command line veterans. IMHO UAC is a good balance between low privileged modes of general operation and "the hassle" of security restrictions. Its far better than the common XP style of everyone being admin.

The fact is that Vista is the first MS OS out the door using their secure software development lifecycle. That methodology has delivered too - it has less security patches than common Linux distros or MacOSX in the same time period. Same with the number of unpatched security flaws that have a critical rating.

Recently I tried Ubuntu for something new and having spent professional time on various *nix servers I was appalled at how buggy feisty fawn indeed is in comparison to Vista. The Linux kernel is great but the remaining other software to make it a polished desktop OS simply isnt mature. Unlike the *nix zealots, atleast the MacOSX zealots who try to rubbish MS have a good desktop OS to compare too - it has taken the strengths of *nix and polished it into a nice user experience. MacOSX is good. The problem is the limited hardware it can run on from the closed sales model that Apple have with it.
well, vista has less security patches coz major security problems CANT be patched. The OS should be rewritten ground up (infact Vienna will replace Vista after just 2 years) to fix the major issues.
also on OS software, you can read the source and spot problems, while you cant on "closed" source ones...
Also dont forget the UAC is the same thing *nix had from the beginning... that's quite a few years ago...
for what concerns linux, i dont think ubuntu is the right choice to evaluate the GNU/Linux OSes maturity.
get a more "commercial" distro, like suse, slackware or redhat... they have a "commercial" support team as M$ has...
however since this thread is about memory consumption, i'd like to add OSX and AXGL have both a better graphical interfaces than vista and they eat up much less memory. They also work with non PS2.0 video cards... something required by Vista to use Aero.

[Bathrone]

Thanks mate I'll check out suse I think. Even basic things in Ubuntu like configuring the refresh rate of my monitor turned into an hour long exercise of manually exiting the x conf file with arcane entries that I had to research online on horizontal and vertical frequencies that only ended in X not booting afterwards. In Vista PNP detects my monitors capabilities and I can nicely choose my refresh rate in a simple drop down list.

Anyway the argument that says Vista has less patches on security because it strangely somehow cannot be patched is a false one. If you look at securina or other websites that audit these things you will see the number of unpatched security issues is actually less than many alternative OS's.

The argument that says open source is inherently more secure to closed source is an argument which is not supported by audits. If you actually compare the numbers it proves that claim false.

I'm not a Vista zealot, I use other OS's professionally and at home. The reality is though that many people like to belittle MS and arent fair in what their criticisms are. Vista has faults, but the arguments your presenting are not real ones.

[JohnnyMalaria]

well, look at the number of fixes in Vista SP1 ... oh wait... SP1 is not even final and Vista is less than 1 year old...
my thought is Vista was released as an unfinished product. people struggled with its bugs and even after applying the SP1 there will still be tons of bugs...

Rant, rant, rant.

You started this thread asking "Microsoft Windows Vista: How much memory is enough?"

Almost immediately, you turned it into yet another anti-Vista, anti-MS, pro-Linux temper tantrum. As might be expected.

To answer your original question:

I found 1GB adequate for Vista Ultimate 32-bit. My main use: software development using Visual Studio .NET 2005.

However, trying to run VS and one instance of Virtual PC 2007put it slightly over the edge (by about 50MB). So I changed to 2GB (for very little money in the scheme of things) and now it hums, even when VS is running along with two Virtual PCs (an XP Pro and a Vista Ultimate).

Yep, Vista Ultimate and XP Pro running simultaneously on Vista Ultimate without any performance issues at 2GB.

What do I think of Vista? I'm not going to say because it isn't germane to the topic.

[salehin]

I was wondering apart from nice outlook, if there is any other net advantage of choosing Vista over XP. My limited use (housemate's laptop) tells me it's just marginal

[JohnnyMalaria]

I was wondering apart from nice outlook, if there is any other net advantage of choosing Vista over XP. My limited use (housemate's laptop) tells me it's just marginal

At the moment, not really.

[Sagekilla]

On the note of Vista, apparently M$ is planning on releasing new OS's more frequently, with the next one targeted for 2010 It think. I read it in article, I think it was in my latest issue of Maximum PC; the article goes on to say how M$ is going to make Windows go to an almost "year subscription based OS." This annoys me to no end if they have the gall to actually do this. If they ever follow up on this idea, I can see Windows XP being used for a very long time even if M$ stops supporting it. I know I'll still be using it, unless one of the new "yearly" OS' has features I "need."

Plus, I don't even see how they're going to be able to pull off a frequent update platform when they had trouble even developing Vista -- which, in my opinion, has relatively few USEFUL improvements for the average user -- in a timely fashion. It's going to take a hell of a lot of effort out of M$ to create a "new and improved" OS that's worth upgrading to on a more frequent basis.

[JohnnyMalaria]

On the note of Vista, apparently M$ is planning on releasing new OS's more frequently, with the next one targeted for 2010 It think.

With the notable exception of Vista, this has always been the case - if not more frequently.

Win3.1 - April 1992
WfW3.11 - November 1993
Win95 - August 1995
Win98 - June 1998
Win2K - February 2000
WinMe - September 2000
WinXP - October 2001
WinXP MCE 2003 - December 2003
WinXP MCE 2005 - October 2004
WinXP Pro x64 - April 2005
Vista - November 2006/January 2007

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Windows_Family_Tree.png

Full history at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows

[Taktaal]

It seems that a large part why Windows sucks so much is the laziness and incompetence of driver developers. Nvidia can't figure out how to write a graphics driver that properly works with 3GB+ main memory, and nobody has written an AHCI driver yet that isn't a horrible piece of ****.
And we haven't even started looking at 64 bit issues yet!

As things look right now, it might take until 2010 to make Vista64 as usable as XP32, and that's gonna put a large dent in Moore's law when nobody can upgrade their workstations past 2GB memory :(

[Sagekilla]

Indeed it hasn't always been the case, but the point is that in the mainstream consumer market there really has been little improvement. From Windows XP to Vista, with Media Center in between, there really was nothing added in to Vista or MC that I can't do with free software. Granted there was the 64-bit edition released in there that you simply cannot reproduce without buying that edition, but that isn't exactly "mainstream" either.

My point was that for the consumer running a regular computer, not the professionals using multi-gigabytes of RAM and more then one CPU socket, there really was very little improvement from XP to Vista. I have tried the latest Media Center as well as Vista and I found both to be subpar. At least with vista there's some hope of it improving somewhat since it's very young. If I recall XP had it's own share of troubles when it first came out.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Indeed it hasn't always been the case, but the point is that in the mainstream consumer market there really has been little improvement. From Windows XP to Vista, with Media Center in between, there really was nothing added in to Vista or MC that I can't do with free software. Granted there was the 64-bit edition released in there that you simply cannot reproduce without buying that edition, but that isn't exactly "mainstream" either.

My point was that for the consumer running a regular computer, not the professionals using multi-gigabytes of RAM and more then one CPU socket, there really was very little improvement from XP to Vista. I have tried the latest Media Center as well as Vista and I found both to be subpar. At least with vista there's some hope of it improving somewhat since it's very young. If I recall XP had it's own share of troubles when it first came out.

Yet.

There are new features embedded into Vista at a fundamental level that will gradually be used by new applications which will only run on Vista (or higher).

When Win95 came out (the first truly 32-bit consumer Windows), there was hardly any 32-bit software except for Win32s stuff for Win3.1. To most people at that time, Win95 simply offered a new GUI.....I remember buying it in August 1995 only to find that my 16-bit video capture card wouldn't work. MS refunded my money :eek:

[Bathrone]

I was wondering apart from nice outlook, if there is any other net advantage of choosing Vista over XP. My limited use (housemate's laptop) tells me it's just marginal

The biggest advantage is substantially better security. The new search method is better.

DX10 probably doesnt matter to you.There is slightly better time to boot and better use of memory by the kernel.

The mobile features make it easier to synch your laptop and do all the common laptop things but this in my view is an evolution rather than a massive new benefit. The benefits to imaging and managing builds wont matter to you cos your not a company.

I dont see MS getting into yearly OS releases at all. The business market simply would not deal with it. MS wont do that. There is over 55 million lines of code in Vista. Even with thousands of devs in their teams they just arent going to be releasing new OS's in any quick fashion.

[Inventive Software]

Vista may have better use of memory, but it still uses about twice as much on average than XP!

[Bathrone]

I encourage you to explore more deeply where that memory is actually being used.....by what processes.

People are too used to seeing the XP style kernel wasting free ram and having it unused. Then they see Vista with like 1mb free and they have a panic. Whats really happening is that Vista is far better at caching and has a smart algorithm that actually understands what your computer usage patterns are and sets things ups to best suit that.

Vista works in 1GB and I ran that config for some months during CTPs and beta.

[Waleska]

Vista performs slower than XP on any memory amount, yet it doesn't seem to offer one worth-noting advantage over the former except for the eye candy, which I don't care for.

[Sharktooth]

exactly. the "improved security" is BS. Blue pill style rootkits still work even with beta SP1. this is an UNPATCHED MAJOR SECURITY ISSUE. the MS One Care is useless since the antivirus is crappy, the antispyware is crappy... etc.
All that stuff eats memory and performance while the average joe just havent a clue on whats happening and why his PC is so freaking slow.
Caching sux too! Coz those algos eat CPU cycles and gamers cant get the same performance in videogames as they get in XP.
Vista is a POC that hogs your system just to show you a nice but much more complicated user interface that need tons of clicks to get in places where you could get there with two clicks in XP... Should i continue?

We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP.
and to sum it up:
Vista is the better Windows, because it behaves better, because it looks better and because it feels better. But it cannot perform better than Windows XP.
100% eye candy, 0% good stuff. That's what Vista is.
The name says it all...

[Bathrone]

Sharktooth present a real argument and will you have a point. You dont apply rational thinking to points being made. You claim illogical things that are not supported by metrics. Your so far out on the lunatic fringe your now trying to assert that products such as OneCare, which isnt even part of a Vista build, somehow relate to your debate on Vista. There is a number of 800+ page books on the additional security found in Vista. Qualified security experts, some of which are known to dislike MS greatly, have acknowledged the substantially better security in Vista compared to any OS MS ever released. Until you present a proper argument all your contributing is Linux evangalistic noise. Linux, which the top three distros as a matter of fact has more unpatched and patched security issues than Vista not to even begin to consider the poor device support and poor user friendliness. At the end of the day you can put out as much nonsense as you like, but the reality is Linux stands to have an OS market share on the web of about 0.77%. Next to the great majority of desktops running Windows.

Waleska you claim no performance benefit. Yet, we see Vista booting faster than XP. And Vista being faster in memory benchmarks to name two examples. The additional security you ignore, all with all the other features. Just because Aero is all a simplistic user see's, does not mean thats the extent of the changes.

[Inventive Software]

Vista may well boot faster than XP, but how much stuff does it load in the background immediately after giving you a desktop? I could almost guarantee there's disk activity as Vista loads more of it's bloat that most people won't need.

[Sharktooth]

what i presented are all valid arguments and the source i quoted was tom's hardware.
Your so far out on the lunatic fringe your now trying to assert that products such as OneCare, which isnt even part of a Vista build, somehow relate to your debate on Vista
yes coz it comes with Vista! and it is also vulnerable!
im pleased you have the usual "Micro$oft defender at all the cost" attitute that can be spotted on every microsoft fanboy but let me tell you one thing: read more, get more informed and dont look only at one side...
everyone has preferences but you're ridiculous.
im sick of all this and to hear BS. so im off. keep living with your ignorance.
when you have something to prove Vista is better than XP coz it's PERFORMING better and it's effectively more SECURE, then you're welcome. otherwise keep your mumbo jumbo for yourself.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Most benchmarks comparing Vista and XP *fail to turn off Aero". Just open Task Manager and see how much CPU time dwm.exe uses. Often, it is between 5 and 10%. The more going on on the display, the more it uses.

I've ran multiple benchmarks of CPU and graphics intensive software and XP, Vista and XP Pro x64. Without Aero, XP and Vista are indistinguishable and x64 is slightly slower. With Aero, Vista is slower.

I'm a highly qualified and experienced scientist, I design and execute experiments all the time and then disseminate the findings in peer-reviewed journals. Present to me a scientifically sound experiment and results and maybe, just maybe, I'll pay attention to some of the anti-Vista tantrums that plague this place. Don't just run a couple of applications and come back with stupid qualitative statements or numbers that aren't substantiated by details, details, details of the methods employed.

The extra 10% that it takes an out-of-the-box Vista configuration to run is:

1. "So what?!!" - if you're running overnight (very common), it might mean an extra 15 to 20 mins. Just enjoy the option sit on the toilet longer in the morning
2. About the same amount of time spent ranting and raving about it
3. Avoidable by knowing how to optimize Vista and optimizing platforms is something nearly everyone here does

OK, I feel better now.