[Excessum]

Originally Posted by noodle

You can tweek vista to make it faster than XP could ever be... Vista has some serious power when you allocate a limited amount of memory to all the crap that's running in the background.

Tell it to the average end user lol. But you will have to give me some solid proof for me to believe that Vista runs 32bit apps better than XP.

Originally Posted by noodle

Also, at work, I'm actually testing a computer I built for some Video/Graphics guru's. dual core Xeon processor, 16gb Ram, SAS drives etc. On 32bit Xp, it was terrible. The ram, as you know, won't go past 3gb. I set up an array to have two SAS drives work together to become one which makes things faster, but 32bit XP doesn't see much difference...
Then come the 64bit xp... For this, XP runs amazingly well. But has disgusting issues running a lot of programs. In fact, the majority of programs install, but have like a backward compatibility thing where they install and run as 32 bit programs. It sucks...

The thing with 64-bit XP was that when it came out, no-one really cared about it... the 64-bit software is starting to bloom only now... heck there wasn't even a decent antivirus available for a 64-bit system back in 2006. So yeah and now all the 64-bit windows stuff is developed basing on NT 6.0/6.1 API instead of the old one. That's progress, yet i see the 64-bit XP as a pretty important turning point in the evolution of workstation 64-bit software/hardware and ultimately - driver developement.

Originally Posted by noodle

Vista, aww, amazing vista. I never seen something run so smooth and so... WOW... I was in Awe... I set up a dual screen layout, ran several programs; Photoshop, Maya, AutoCAD, media player, IE, itunes, Call of Duty 4. THEN I opened a ONE GIG text file... The file opened in 5 seconds... On the other XP's, with nothing else running, the text file opened in no less than 5 minutes...

NT 6 is good, isn't it... but still, i suggest you give the Windows server 2008 evolution a try. You can even turn Aero on it and it will look and feel just like a Vista, only have a more fluent and less memory consuming work. You can find a lot of tutorials on the net on how to make it fly as high as Vista will never be able to do :P (btw, there is a rumor going around the forums that there is a Server 2008 workstation version in developement... it should kick ass)

Originally Posted by noodle

So now, in my report I'm giving in to the company, me and my boss (guy that actually knows all the stuff) are gonna recommend the company to incorporate Vista instead of sticking with XP. Especially for the high end users.
Next week, i'll be working on making a company specific image of Vista. So, soon enough, i'll be able to find out how much of the crap running the background is actually needed. But according to the boss, Vista has far greater potential than XP.

Well, make sure to tell us about the results... i will be more than glad to see how much of the services and utils you hacked out of there and the end results (maybe you could even do a lil before/after benchmark? That would rock!)

EDIT: ooff... forgot to mention that Vista (NT 6) actually is better for multi threading - both in multi-core CPUs and multi-GPU setups... but in the end it, of course, always depends on the software being used.