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"When 10.5.1 came out, boot times decreased, some things felt snappier. I loaded up Fedora 8 and compared to Fedora 7, it was snappier on the same hardware. Windows XP SP3 has now been 'benchmarked' to being snappier. Why is Windows Vista the 'odd one out'?"

It sounds like you have an answer in mind. Care to tell us?

I think the answer is that Vista has a much higher percentage of new code than is the case in the examples you gave. Now, the change from XP to Vista is not nearly as drastic as the change from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, but even so, it should be noted that the latter transition did result in an OS that was much slower relative to its predecessor than Vista is relative to its predecessor. The reason OSX 10.0 was so slow was that all of that new code hadn't been optimized yet. The OSX releases since have added features, but also tweaked the existing code, so optimizations have been added over the years, which why it gets faster over time (yet Apple doesn't allow 10.5 to be installed on lower-end PPC macs, so it's questionable whether 10.5 is "fast" on such computers, and I do know that many did find 10.4 to be slower than 10.3).

Same for XP SP3 (according to what you've posted), SP3 contains performance increases that have been added over the years (for enterprise customers), which might result in XP SP3 being faster than XP SP2 and before.

Vista's been out less than a year, so it hasn't had time for lots of optimizations to be added to the code base. Yet its Windows Updates have already made it faster than it was when it was released. Let Vista get a chance to add performance enhancements over the next few years like OSX and XP have had.

So that's my answer - Vista has lots of new code that hasn't had years and years to be optimized yet.


Now, I realize that the answer offered by many Microsoft bashers is either that DRM is run all over the place (our own PlatformAgnostic, who now works at Microsoft on the Windows Kernel Test Team says that's bull), or simply that Microsoft programmers are incompetent (which I find laughable; their programmers come from the same universities as does Apple, Red Hat, etc).

But I am curious as to what reason you would offer as to "Why is Windows Vista the 'odd one out'?" I gather from the tone of your post that you have an answer in mind.

Edited 2007-11-24 04:28