Windows XP outshines Vista in benchmarking test

New tests have revealed that XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1. Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Devil Mountain Software the improvement was not overwhelming — leaving the latest Windows iteration out shined by its predecessor.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed over two times slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds. Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than two percent compared to performance without SP1 — much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent.

Tags: windows xp, sp3, microsoft

The benefits of Vista are neither evident nor proven

1. For the ordinary user, Vista doesn't really have a unique sales proposition. XP does just as well, and works;
2. Vista is widely thought of as buggy, and unsupportive of existing software;
3. Many home users own hardware doesn't meet Vista's minimum hardware requirements - and they question, given the cost, hassle and risks of upgrading, and the other points above, why they should spend the cash.

In addition, businesses face a huge outlay in retraining staff (particularly sysadmins), hardware upgrades or replacement, software upgrades to compatible packages, and support costs, if they move to Vista.

Unsurprisingly, the business community is extremely reluctant to adopt Vista, whose benefits are seen as neither evident nor proven, when they've finally ironed the bugs out of their XP installations, and fallen back to an inexpensive drip-feed support level.

Nvidia 8800GTS pictured here

SO, WHAT DOES the 8800GTS look like?
Just like any other card with a big-ass heatsink on it.
There's not a lot to see here, but some of you will get excited.

Enjoy.

Tags: nvidia 8800 GTS