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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

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

It's just been *5 years* in the making, that's all... *HARDLY* enough time to actually OPTIMIZE anything, before shipping it to Microsoft's adoring public!

Seriously, you'd think with ALL the money Bill Gates/Microsoft has, they could put out a decent sequel to XP, not only in LESS time than 5 yrs., but also something that runs BETTER than XP, not worse!

Apparently the only thing Microsoft is good at is copying looks, not performance. :-)

Apple knows what they're doing and where they're going. Is it any wonder why Microsoft's motto was:

"Where do you want to go today?"

Because they never knew where THEY were going, so they were hoping someone else did and they'd simply hitch a free ride!

Obviously, they can't even do THAT right! :-)

Your use of "So that's my answer - Vista has lots of new code that hasn't had years and years to be optimized yet.
" is wrong. If you install XP without Service packs and updates it's at it's fastest and the only thing that has got better is security and less bugs.

Microsoft dont give a crap about users but they love their business buddies to make office apps faster in Service Packs. Vista needed new code badly regardless and this is what you get when you dont update your OS so frequently. On OS X they dont need to overhaul the OS like Vista because it was not left to rot in the first place.