Is Windows Vista Really That Bad?

As the release of Windows Vista approached, the reports about how neat it was quickly turned to reports about how messed up it was, or still is: dropped features, poor performance, compatibility problems, crashes, you name it. Most of that was overblown. Certainly the computers that ran the five-year-old Windows XP couldn’t all be expected to run Vista well (even the much-heralded Mac OS bumps-up system requirements significantly over that span of time).

But some of the noise was deserved, and Vista certainly had its share of growing pains. But it’s been a year and a half. The first service pack has been released, along with an absolute flood of other automatic updates and drivers and software patches and so on. Is Vista really all that bad? More to the point, is it even worth upgrading anymore?

The short answer, I think, is yes. If you buy a PC today and it has Vista installed on it, or build a new PC (even a low cost, sub-$1,000 box), you should be in fine shape.

The driver situation has really come along to the point where Vista is perhaps better supported on new-ish hardware than XP is, and the work Microsoft did in changing lots of driver models to stabilize the system is finally paying off—more drivers, and parts of drivers, run in User Space instead of Kernel Space now, so one messed up driver doesn’t hose your whole system the way XP would, and many driver problems are recoverable without a reboot. Performance is finally there, even on what you would consider a pretty cheap PC with integrated graphics. Vista sure appears to use more resources than XP, but appearances can be deceiving. Take RAM for instance. Empty RAM does nothing for you. You don’t want empty RAM, you want RAM filledup with pre-cached data so your applications and data files snap open without hammering the hard drive, with enough intelligence to free up that RAM if an app needs it. Vista does this pretty well. Hard drive space is a non-issue.

It really doesn’t matter if your OS takes up 3GB, or 8GB, or 12GB of your hard disk. It’s a small fraction of even most laptop hard drives these days. In fact, the percentage of the average hard drive used up by the Windows installation has declined with each major release, as the size of hard drives have increased faster than the size of the Windows installation. The truth is (as much as a person’s opinion can be “truth”), Vista “feels” as fast or faster than XP on any computer a year old or less, and even on some of the better machines that are older than that. And it’s got lots of nice features, if you can get yourself out of the “do everything exactly as in XP” mindset long enough to try them.

The “trail of breadcrumbs” at the top of an Explorer window is a great improvement. Popping open the Start menu and simply typing a few characters of what you’re looking for, then seeing the program and file list update in real time, is a very fast an easy way to get to that app, file, control panel, or utility you’re looking for.

There are actually Sidebar applets worth having now. Individual volume controls for all applications can be very useful. Vista-only features like DirectX 10 are finally starting to become meaningful.

You may have heard of Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment marketing campaign. The company took a whole mess of PC users who haven’t tried Vista yet, but hate it based on all the bad stuff they hear. You almost certainly know someone like this (or maybe you are one yourself). Then they showed these people what they said was the next version of Windows, named “Mojave.” Which everyone loved. Then the Microsoft group told everyone—surprise!— Mojave is actually Windows Vista. Sure, it’s just a goofy marketing trick and you could pull the Folgers Switch with a lot of things and get a similar reaction. But I think there’s some truth to it.

Vista got a bad rap, and perhaps not undeservedly so. The Vista experience today, however, doesn’t live up to that extraordinarily negative reputation. If you’re dead-set against it, maybe it’s time for another look.

Microsoft provides tuning tips for Windows Vista

Microsoft is extending its Windows Vista marketing efforts even further by releasing a series of tuning tips to download. The company has published some well known tips to speed up Windows Vista in one way or another, in PDF and XPS formats.

The document is part of a marketing campaign in which Microsoft is attempting to spruce up Vista’s bad reputation. A number of white papers have already been published pertaining to enterprise applications or comparisons of functional scope. They contained the usual claims – safer, faster, more stable, more innovative – and not all companies were convinced. Intel and Daimler have already said they will not be migrating to Windows Vista, to name just two prominent examples. Recently, a website for the Mojave Experiment also went live. There, PC users who had a bad impression of Vista, even though they had not used it, get excited about videos of an apparently new Windows

Many of the tuning tips are not specific to Vista. The software vendor recommends getting rid of programs and services you do not need under “autorun” – a tip that also applies to previous Windows versions; this is also the only one that led to truly measurable speed increases in our tests. Microsoft says that disabling the visual effects also measurably speeds up Windows – ever so slightly, but you do notice the difference. And another tip not only applies for Windows Vista: you can start work again faster if you switch to standby rather than shutting down your PC.

Other tips listed in the document have been proven to only help in rare cases, such as enabling ReadyBoost – using a USB stick as additional cache, or defragging your hard drive.

System RAM is a performance issue: many retailers advertise bargain deals on PC’s where part of the cost cutting is to ship the systems with insufficient RAM for optimum Vista performance. Microsoft say on their product specification pages that Vista’s minimum memory requirement is between 512 Megabytes and 1 Gigabyte, depending on the version. In their tuning tips document Microsoft say many organisations have had good results with 2GB. Most industry experts agree that 4GB is Vista’s sweetspot.

Samsung, Microsoft in Talks to Speed up SSDs on Vista

Samsung isn’t just pushing the envelope in storage capacity of SSDs (solid-state drives), it is also working with software makers to boost SSD performance on operating systems. The company on Wednesday said it was in talks with Microsoft to improve the performance of SSDs on the Windows OS.

The speed and way in which SSDs fetch and cache data are different than hard drives, said Michael Wang, flash marketing manager at Sun. Samsung hopes to work with Microsoft to boost SSD performance on Windows by discovering optimal packet sizes for data transfers and the best ways to read and write files, for example.

“We have been so used to hard drives for so many years, Windows is optimized for that obviously,” Wang said.

Windows is designed to fetch and cache data using rotating media, but by working with Microsoft, Samsung wants to distinguish SSDs from hard drives on the Windows OS, Wang said.

Wang declined to provide further information on the discussions with Microsoft.

It is generally thought that SSDs could replace hard drives, but both differ in data sizes and how Windows should treat both, said Gregory Wong, an analyst with Forward Insights.

There is a mismatch in the way Windows Vista handles data sizes on hard drive and SSDs, Wong said. Vista has been optimized to handle hard-drive data in smaller chunks. In contrast, the sector size — also known as page size — of SSDs are larger than hard drive sector sizes. That results in inefficient SSD performance when slotted into a disk drive bay, Wong said.

“My guess is that [Samsung and Microsoft] are maybe working on the OS recognizing an SSD with a 4K-byte sector size instead of a hard disk drive with a 512-byte sector size,” Wong said.

Sun is already working with Samsung to bulk up SSD support on the ZFS (Zettabyte File System), which is included in the Solaris OS, and will also be supported in Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.6, codenamed Snow Leopard. Sun is adding capabilities to boost the durability and performance of SSDs on ZFS-based operating systems. For example, Sun may add defragmentation capabilities for SSDs, which organizes data in a particular order to enable quicker data access.

SSDs were not considered ideal for defragmentation because of limited read-and-write capabilities, Wong said. However, Samsung and Sun in July jointly announced an 8G-byte SSD that bumped up durability from 100,000 read-and-write cycles to 500,000. That brings defragmentation in SSDs closer to reality, which could improve its caching and provide quicker access to data. Sun plans to put SSDs into storage products later this year.

Samsung will release 128G-byte SSDs in the third quarter, and by the end of the year it will put 256G-byte SSDs into production, Wang said. The density of SSDs are doubling every 12 months, Wang said. That means a 512G-byte SSD could be coming soon, although Wang neither confirmed nor denied it.

“It is a matter of cost, demand and requirement,” Wang said.

Samsung is also working to reduce power consumption and developing controller algorithms to boost the longevity of SSDs, Wang said.

Despite the continuous improvements, price-per-gigabyte could continue to be an issue when comparing SSDs to hard drives, Forward Insight’s Wong said.

“The cost per gigabyte of a 2.5-inch SSD is something like five times that of a hard disk drive,” Wong said. The price difference mainly applies to the consumer space, where PC makers like Apple, Dell and HP offer SSDs in laptops.

Samsung’s Wang said the company is working with PC makers to develop SSD form factors that could fit into different laptop models.

In the server space, customers may bypass price for performance, said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory at Sun in a recent interview. Server-grade SSDs usually perform better in certain environments like Web 2.0, where they are comparatively faster and more power efficient than hard drives.

Web 2.0 applications could drive the adoption of SSDs in the enterprise, Cornwell said. Delivery of distributed Web 2.0 applications — like cached photo content — may be delivered quicker from SSD nodes than hard drives, Cornwell said.

Many server vendors have announced plans to include server-grade SSDs in systems, including Hewlett-Packard. Samsung is working with PC makers and server vendors on the implementation of SSDs, Wang said.

“Most of these data centers, when they employ a new technology, it takes a long time to … qualify and evaluate,” Wang said.

Source: pcworld