GamePC: Windows Vista : Frequently Asked Questions - Answered

[YeOldeStonecat]

"Over the last several months, the web has been bombarded with information in regards to the release of Microsoft's first new operating system in five years, Windows Vista. We've been tracking the release of Vista since the original Longhorn betas, and we can certainly see that development has come a long way from those days. Longhorn was originally devised to be a quick update after the release of XP, although it quickly ballooned into one of the largest projects Microsoft has ever taken on. While Longhorn’s initial goals seemed solid, development was marred by countless delays, feature cuts, and general usability problems. From the beginning, performance, aesthetics, and interfaces were terrible. However, the Longhorn project “rebooted” and started fresh, years after development, which finally got them on the right track. The final shipping Vista product is amazingly different in comparison to the original betas. It's solid, easy to use, and performs quite well, as long as you have some decent hardware to power it. We've already gone through the major feature changes of Windows Vista over XP in our earlier previews, so there's no need to go over them in detail. Quickly though, Vista's major new features are its new "Aero" graphical user interface, a new (more stable) code-base, re-designed security and parental controls, re-designed networking and audio controls, and much, much more. There are thousands upon thousands of changes under the hood with Vista, many of the changes won't be noticeable upon first glance, but enthusiasts and power users will be able to notice right away that Vista is a far better operating system as a whole in comparison to XP. Many of the long lingering issues we’ve just associated with the Windows experience are now gone with Vista.
We've had the past five years to tweak and bend Windows XP to our wills, whereas Vista is still uncharted territory for most enthusiasts - it will certainly take time to figure out every little detail of this new operating system and how to optimize performance and interfaces to suit one's specific needs. A lot of users out there are confused about the information they've seen on Vista thus far, requiring ultra high-end hardware and supposedly sucking up tons of memory and disk space, not to mention that there is a lot of conflicting information out there in regards to Vista's performance levels. We wanted to provide answers for some of the most commonly asked questions in regards to Vista thus far.
Here are the questions we aim to answer.

• What are the differences between the Vista versions?
• How long does Vista take to install?
• What kind of resources do Windows Vista installs use?
• How does Vista perform against Windows XP?
• How does Vista perform with and without Aero Glass?
• How does Vista perform with and without ReadyBoost?
• How does Vista 32-bit compare to Vista 64-bit?
• What are the best ways to improve Vista performance?"

Full article here:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...d=vista&page=1

[Jamie_R]

good article - thanks 'Cat

[Sava700]

I'm using Vista Manager right now to tweak some stuff..its a 15day trial but I think I got everything I need done before it runs out.. you can find that on download.com site.

[Randy]

I was wondering how readyboost would perform with 4gb of ram vs 2gb and a 2gb stick. They did not do that particular test but from what i read It looks as though ready boost enabled is only a minimal increase in performance.

[Rivas]

Thank you CAT.

[YARDofSTUF]

I was wondering how readyboost would perform with 4gb of ram vs 2gb and a 2gb stick. They did not do that particular test but from what i read It looks as though ready boost enabled is only a minimal increase in performance.

Depends on what you do, for small stuff, or random I/O reads ready boost increases performance because it has low latency, 0.7-0.9ms vs a hard drive, 9-14ms. For larger reading, sequential I/O, readyboost ignores it and lets vista read it from the pagefil becuase the harddrives faster reading speed will get the big job done quicker.