More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor

Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is 'considerably faster' than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista."

So?

[El Lobo]

So they are having dificulties converting users from XP to Vista? And they are laughing all the way to the bank.

OTOH, people and enterprises are slowly but sure upgrading to vista. The university where I work just took the step and upgraded 25 computer labs (30 computers each) from XP to Vista. Our departments are now slowly migrating as well. There is no rush... Why do we need to rush if XP was working great for us? If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

But now every new computer we buy, we get it with Vista. Seeing the users that have Vista just make the rest of us realize that Vista is not the horror that somepeople seem to be. Knowledge is the best medicine, so people see "oh, it works well", "oh, UAC was not THAT bad, it barely comes up when you work and don't install things"..,so slowly, more and more people are willing to upgrade. This is our case, and i think this is happening everywhere.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[wereHamster]

> ... game publishers only release DX10-compatible versions ...

By that time the Wine (www.winehq.org) team will have released DX10 libraries that use opengl and thus can run on Win XP or older (and of course Linux!).

Re:So?

[sledge_hmmer]

I would disagree with your statement that Vista "works well". I bought a Dell XPS 1210 laptop back in June pre-loaded with Vista. I would not call myself an absolute poweruser, but I am definitely well above average. Anyway, I figured I would give Vista a shot since everyone on Slashdot was bitching about it. I installed all the my required programs in the first week and saw an ungodly number of UAC pop-ups, but let's just let that slide since I was changing system settings. In the following 3 weeks, I am not kidding you when I say Vista would give me a BSOD at least 2-3 times a week. I'm sorry but in my books that is not acceptable. I know this is not a popular sentiment here, but I thought XP actually worked well enough for everyday work. I honestly cannot remember the last time I saw a BSOD or had to do a hard reboot to get over a application crash in XP. So compared to that Vista was absolute trash. Just my 2cents.

Slight problem

[SmallFurryCreature]

Halo 2 AIN'T a vista only game. It has been hacked and works just as well on XP. That isn't really suprising, it is an ancient game that ran on a P3, what the hell would it need DX10 for?

Other games like the recent system cruncher, Crysis, also can be tweaked to run with "disabled, DX10 only" settings on XP.

It seems more and more that a lot of the DX10 games just ain't there, some day there may be, but so far they are not.

MS could afford to force Halo 2 to Vista only, how many game developers can afford to be Vista only? MS better be handing over a huge sum of money to make a game just for Vista.

The problem is that a LOT of hardcore gamers are people who build their own machines, and are also the ones who need the top end Vista version, so they are faced with a very expensive purchase and for what? So that all their games run slower and take more memory?

It will be intresting to see what happens, I personally have little doubt that MS will survive this easily, but their mighty fortress has shown a tiny crack.

IF linux does indeed get DX10 support as some have claimed in the past via Wine like projects, then MS might be in real trouble.

That is a HUGE if, but in theory it is possible, already companies like Blizzard have to deal with the fact that a portion of their players are on linux and that they have to accept this.

It will be intresting to see how the Vista only titles sell in the near future. MS titles don't count, MS can afford to loose money, regular developers can't.

Re:So?

[usrcpp]

Well, it depends. Our company takes care of 3,000+ WinXP workstations at a major airline's regional headquarters and migration to Vista isn't even on the table for discussion at the moment. Why? Because there's a tightly integrated suite of very expensive applications from over a dozen publishers that have been tuned to work on the hardware and OS of those machines. And given the fact that the technicians are stretched as it is, the last thing they want is to deal with a whole new set of compatibility issues. And let's not forget the cost of training all those employees. And on top of that you have the inevitable influx of all kinds of wonderful new OS-related incidents. And then you have the issue of justifying the surge in costs.

There is no justifiable reason why a company like ours would choose to willfully drink the poison that is Vista.

Re:Mod parent "Troll"

[Anonymous Coward]

The 10.n upgrades to Mac OS X are more like MS service packs than new operating systems. The underlying unix does not change all that much. The significant changes are mostly at the windowing level, in the graphics, and in the software. So yes, the service pack analogy is a good one.

http://mrsquid.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Something really telling...

[eNygma-x]

I too work at a college. And we will be resisting Vista until the performance is better. What is funny is how the students are continually downgrading to XP. (they will find a way) And with gaming consoles students are less likely to switch to Vista. Macs have made a surge with our students but so has Linux. (which I'm happier about) Oh and before I forget. We also offer free computer support to the students. With all the machines we touch, we have yet see a Vista machine perform better than an XP machine, even brand new out of the box.

The question is consideration

[alexhmit01]

Are people considering Linux/Mac desktops/servers and adding them to the environment. Windows 2000 Active Directory made it hard to add the non-MS LDAP/Kerberos machines to the network, Windows 2003 has made it harder, though Win2003R3 has apparently helped. This certainly helps lock in, but assuming Redhat/Novell decides to make it trivial to add a machine in time by creating a Win32 Program to add things to AD, and Win2003R2 added the SFU Schema Extensions by default, and all of a sudden, adding Linux services can help, a lot.

One of the things I loved with OS X Server was that their Kerberos/LDAP integrated solution worked great, and adding non-Apple Unix systems was pretty easy... authenticate against LDAP, accept Kerberos, and just Add Principal (host, HTTP, whatever) and export a Keytab. It helped that Apple used MIT Kerberos which is the best documented solution.

The thing is, if the computer market is growing at say, 8% a year, Microsoft needs to be grabbing a larger share of computer wallet to hit double-digit growth. If Linux/Apple grab extra growth, say 4% of the market each, Microsoft will see either a decline in revenues or need to increase fees, which will force people to look elsewhere.

Win2K/Win2K3 made things much tougher for small businesses compared to NT4, Active Directory is MUCH harder to setup and use than a simple NT 3.51/NT4 Single Domain, but the well priced SBS solution provided a reason to keep them in the market. However, if someone with an Enterprise Play like Redhat/Novell made an effort to make it EASY to install a Redhat Server with LDAP/Kerberos authentication for both the server AND the webserver and whatever else, you start seeing it easy to migrate Web Apps to the Unix land.

Microsoft's marketshare doesn't have to plummet for them to hurt. If they consistently lose 1.5% a year to Apple/Linux, that makes it really hard to grow Revenues and requires them to cut costs to keep up profit growth. That alone limits their ability to just walk into markets and destroy them. When Microsoft "cut off the oxygen" for Netscape with a free browser to stop the Netscape Server package from becoming a threat, they could easily eat the costs of the browser because their newly established desktop/Office Suite monopolies were furnishing massive profits.

If Microsoft managers start obsessing over hitting the numbers, and budget constraints become an important part of the Microsoft bonus structure, then you don't see Internet Explorer projects... You don't see $10-$20 million dollar blackholes on the budget to maintain monopolies.

The loss of Bill Gates also hurts, not because he is an irreplaceable manager, but because he alone had the clout to do strange things. When Apple fired "professional management" and brought Steve Jobs "back," he had the clout to do whatever he wanted. He pushed projects out the door, canceled others, etc., and could be a one man show with control of the business. Founders have MUCH MORE political capital than professional CEOs.

If Gates said, "we must destroy Netscape, regardless of costs" (or Java, or any other technology that he found a threat), he could turn the company on a dime as Founder/major Shareholder.

If Ballmer says, "to hell with profitability, we must destroy Sony PS3/Nintendo Wii, I don't care what we lose in the process," I don't think that he can do it. The heads of the gaming and lifestyle division will go ballistic that they won't make their numbers and get a bonus, and will find people on the Board to back them and get hep. If Gates said that it was a priority, it was a priority, and he could probably change the entire management incentive structure to make it happen. He could create budgets out of thin air for what he called a priority.

Any loss in marketshare for MS is a disaster financially because it destroys profit growth, and the current management lacks the complete control of the company necessary to move the way it moved under Gates.

Re:Slight problem

[LingNoi]

IF linux does indeed get DX10 support as some have claimed in the past via Wine like projects, then MS might be in real trouble.

It was a summer of code project [google.com].

You can download the code from here [google.com]. No idea if the DX10 API has made it into the main wine releases yet.

Re:Mod parent "Troll"

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree entirely. The underlying Unix has changed, including kernel API's, supported interfaces, user management, scripting interfaces, crontab replacement, et cetera. It's much more friendly for developers and sysadmins than it once was. You may not see giant game-breaking changes, but that's because the core technology they started with is much more amenable to upgrade than the MS systems - the changes Apple needs to make tend not to destroy things. And if they do, that's part of the upgrade cycle - Apple thankfully doesn't maintain backwards compatibility more than one outdated version, giving them a lot more freedom to innovate.

Not to karma whore, but

[regular_gonzalez]

Posted this the other day, and it's at least as applicable to this thread. I'll be surprised if the larger companies switch to Vista. A general rule of thumb is that the larger the company, the slower any software transition. Many reasons for this, from testing compatibility of your apps with the new software, to layers of bureaucracy to go through. As an example, General Electric is roughly 60% WinXP and 40% Win2K, at least in Europe -- I can't speak for other territories. Office 2000 is deployed on appoximately 80% of systems, Office XP on another 15%, and only 5% or so having moved to the 'modern' Office 2003 -- this despite known errors in Excel 2000 with workbooks containing lots of pivot tables and formulae running into the 'out of memory' issue. Given that they are the world's second largest company [wikipedia.org], and that there's no way they will be upgrading to any new OS without having, say, 3-4 years to test it and get it approved by the powers that be, that's a huge number of sales Microsoft will miss out on. I can only assume that other comperably large companies have similar behavior. To expound just a bit so it's not pure copy pasta, GE seems to be more conservative under Jeff Immelt than it was under Jack Welch - not necessarily a bad thing, just a difference in leadership style. The only software that they update to the newest and greatest on a regular basis is SAV. I would be incredibly surprised to see Vista rolled out on a site- or business-unit- wide basis, let alone across the entire company. More likely is that the W2K computers are migrated to XP over the next 12-18 months.

what about memory?

[period3]

XP is nice and all, but it only has support for 3GB of memory.

There's always XP64, but last time I checked driver support was pretty sketchy.

I run Vista for this reason alone. Any performance decrease relative to XP is more than made up for by the fact that I'm not running out of memory and swapping.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[morgan_greywolf]

Maybe I could see it for game publishers (maybe), but I kind of doubt it. It's important to keep in mind that hardware and software companies develop for the widest audience possible. If they have to be tied to any one platform, it's going to be the one with the most installed base -- XP. Software development does not drive OS adoption, it's the other way around. That being said, more and more software development in recent years has been cross platform.

The most successful applications (except Microsoft Office, IE, and a few other notable exceptions like Intuit's 'suite') are cross-platform -- Photoshop, Firefox, Dreamweaver, Apache.

So, until/unless Vista gains significant traction, software developers are going to to reluctant to tie themselves to that platform. Microsoft is feeling the force of its own monoculture!

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[somersault]

Yep my new IT underling ordered a laptop that doesn't have an XP option while I was off sick, and I bet it's one of the ones that wont have XP drivers (he's justified it since then by saying we can use it as a test of how well Vista is going to integrate into our network, and that we can install XP on it if it sucks).. I like the guy and don't want to fire him or anything, but if other people start asking for Vista because of this then I may just quit :p I have been really happy with how much Vista is failing, it's hopefully going to open people's eyes up to other choices out there, and demonstrate clearly that newer doesn't always mean better.

SP3 is 10% faster? How much faster than DOS?

[r_jensen11]

Not to troll, but it's not always a mistake when a company issues a new operating system that is slower than the others. Unless their benchmark is rediculously unoptimized, it's difficult to increase functionality AND speed. The issue that I keep on hearing (since I haven't tried it yet) is that Microsoft created a slower operating system with less functionality. Time will tell if this is true or not. Oh wait, it's been out for a year already and we're still hearing the same complaints....

Amen

[Toreo asesino]

Actually, it's the whole business/enterprise functionality that most slashdotters either don't know about or conveniently choose to overlook.

Active Directory + Group Policy Management (server and client side) is the most single integrated solution from client to server that exists. There may other systems that reproduce similar functionality (like samba for instance), but nothing exists as an integrated top-to-bottom solution like Windows AD.

The only other system that came close (and some would argue was better) is Novell Netware, but that doesn't really exist any more.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[TheLinuxSRC]

It is different in that Ubuntu will usually only ask once for a particular action and then it will allow/disallow the action. With Vista's UAC, you will be asked several times if you are sure you want to continue with a single action (e.g. installing software).

I installed Vista a few weeks ago to check it out. Between not having drivers for a Soundblaster Live (and overwriting the hacked drivers I found every time it reboots with MS drivers that make an obnoxious screech instead of real sound), the UAC stuff and random "memory access" violations causing a reboot I gave up on it.

And before I get blasted for using crappy hardware, this machine is only three years old. It was top of the line in its day. It is a dual Xeon 2.8Ghz with 4Gb ECC RAM, SCSI disks and a GeForce 6800. It runs XP, FreeBSD, Solaris and several Linux installations with no problems what so ever. The only OS it has trouble with is Vista - which I have no use for at this point.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[Bacon Bits]

If you understand the difference between hardware and an operating system, you have a choice. The vast majority of the population does not understand this difference. They are hopelessly mated in their minds.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[mgblst]

You are assuming that this is based on logic. After talking to a bunch of the decision makes at my unviersity during a conference last week, you will soon discover that little of this is based on logic, or experience of computer systems of any kind. One lady actually preferred Vista because of the improved eye-candy on her laptop...yes, these are the people making decisions the world over.

Re:Games

[naetuir]

Wine may "emulate" the capabilities of Windows, but you seem to assume that it is inherently slower (or just 'worse') than Windows. This is just not the case.

I run Crossover (a commercial fork of Wine for gamers) on my Mac. It runs every game I've needed so far, almost perfectly. There are a few glitches here and there (usually regarding intro/cutscene videos oddly), but it's better than having to submit to the overlords of Redmond and pay their entry level fee of $300 for Vista Ultimate (required for most gamers because of DX10 - Otherwise they'd have to upgrade later). Or even $200 for XP Pro (because, lets face it, what geek is going to settle for XP Home?).

Mac OS, for upgrades only, is ~$120 (though I just got my 10.5 upgrade for $100), and actually has functional changes in it (New ways to interact with folders, a user friendly way of backing things up, a GUI that always works in a familiar way, et al.).

The only downside I can see is the "entry fee" in to Mac. They do tend to cost ~$200-$500 more than their PC cousins. I still hold that Apple should open up their OS to ALL Intel systems. Yes, they'd have some standard Driver issues... But I think there would be a mass exodus by many M$ users that are hold overs because of the added entry cost of Apple systems.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[gripen40k]

You know, you can disable the UAC [petri.co.il], and find your own drivers [neosmart.net]. Of course, if you are still using a sound blaster live! card, it is now under EOL (end of life) [creative.com] (click through to select your card) and will not have supported drivers for Vista.

These kind of steps are common with any new operating system that is expected to run multitudes of old, unsupported hardware (note that doesn't include OSX). But yes, the default sound drivers for Vista are crap, no argument there :).

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[mqduck]

By that time the Wine (www.winehq.org) team will have released DX10 libraries that use opengl and thus can run on Win XP or older (and of course Linux!).

When game publishers start shipping WINE libraries instead of DirectX updaters with their Windows games, I will be more wonderfully amused than I previously thought possible.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[rootofevil]

really?

worked just fine on my xp box with the patch for dx9.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[AgentPaper]

Yes, on three occasions - one between Me and 2K Professional, two between Vista and XP.

1) One of my uncles suffered through two years of Windows Me on his home laptop, patiently slogging through dozens of corrupted drivers, software incompatibilities and nonexistent networking support. The day the machine suffered a complete registry corruption was the day he decided to get rid of the albatross OS, and you've never seen a happier guy in your life than when that system booted to Windows 2000 for the first time.

2) A friend of my mother's upgraded the family desktop to Vista so her son could play Halo 2. Within three weeks, the entire family was begging to have Vista removed - father because none of his work programs would run under Vista, mother because her customer files from her Arbonne business didn't migrate properly, and son because all his games ran dog-slow and looked like garbage. I reinstalled XP for them, and there was much rejoicing.

3) The same uncle that ran afoul of Windows Me just purchased a top-end Dell XPS that came with Vista Home Premium and Office 2007 loaded, and according to him both programs are slower, buggier and generally more annoying than his old Me/97 install ever could have dreamed of being. Instead of bringing a fruit basket or a bottle of liquor to the family Christmas this year, he asked me for a drive wipe and XP install.

Games aren't enough for the average user

[BrianRagle]

Let's face it, the majority of the consumer Windows market is just not about high-end gaming rigs, able to play the latest games with all graphic options maxed out. They like to browse web pages, chat with friends, send email, utilize office productivity apps, and mess around with their photo/home video collections. For these purposes, just about ANY operating system in current use is adequate. The differences comes down to security, stability, and usability.

For my part, I make a point of keeping an Ubuntu machine going in my house at all times. Friends who come over and want to use a computer to check something while we are waiting for the football game to come on or the pizza to arrive invariably comment on the OS, which leads to questions, which leads to me usually offering them a burned copy of a LiveCD to take home with them. I don't spew a lot of technical jargon at these folks, nor do I assume a fan-boy posture (given the other machines in my house are Apple). I simply "make the sale" to them and answer their questions clearly, responding to their complaints regarding Vista and even XP, at times.

This effort has resulted in about 30% of my friends moving to Ubuntu, with the remainder being split almost evenly between Apple computers and Windows-based rigs. Those who remain on the fence usually sit there because of the singular issue of gaming. Quite frankly, I can think of NO reason for an average consumer to even need to pay for an OS aside from being able to play games.

M$ WINBLOZES LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

You already posted this [slashdot.org], except that you were using your sockpuppet. Perhaps you forgot.

is this the captain obvious forum?

[ILongForDarkness]

Seriously, Vista has a higher required system spec, it has more security. Any time your doing more, whether more GUI, more levels of process security etc. there will be a performance hit. It is very very rare this won't be the case with a simple app, when you add all the complexity of an OS you are vertially garranteed it will be the case.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[CastrTroy]

I envisioned something a little more complicated for the start menu that would probably make things a little bit easier for managing the shortcuts. Basically it could work off a small database. Every shortcut just gets put into a table (Table A), where the shortcut has an ID, and the attributes such as the program that the shortcut is linked to. There's another table (Table B), with the user ID (with null or some other predefined ID for the system default), and the ID of each Item in Table A. In Table B, there's a column that has the users' prefered folder location for the entry, with a bit field so that a user could hide a certain entry. The absence of the entry in the user settings would mean that the entry would show up under the default system location. This would work great because a user to move stuff around, without affecting anybody else. They would also see new stuff added to the start menu. Another great feature is that when a program is uninstalled, it would just remove the entries in Table A, and corresponding entries in Table B, and we wouldn't have the situation we have now with all the left over dead links in the start menu due to items being moved from where the program uninstaller expects them to be. You could also just mark entries as remove in Table A, so that the user can see a message stating that the entry was removed, instead of searching for it forever before discovering that it's actually not there at all.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[Devistater]

Surprisingly, this is one of the more common answers as to why people upgrade. And its not just random clueless people either. I've seen die hard overclockers give this reason, they know they lose a little performance in gaming with vista, but they want the new GUI.

How to avoid Vista in business

[David Gerard]

I'm a Unix sysadmin. I got a new work laptop today, still on XP. I asked the IT guys if we were in any danger of Vista. They said "XP is supported for years yet!" And we all exhaled.

We have worked out that if we are ever threatened with Vista, we promptly (a) pump up the Gutmann [auckland.ac.nz] (b) write a whole pile of in-house apps for ourselves that only work on XP. The latter already worked wonderfully for us in making an instant business case for staying on Firefox — make sure your in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. (This is easy: just write to standards).

So: to stay off Vista, stock up on in-house apps that don't work on it. Then you have the business case you need.

Re:the ever elusive desktop

[vux984]

What is the purpose of virtual video memory? I assume that's the same thing or similar in nature to pagefile.sys.

Similiar yes.

Wouldn't it be better just to keep it in physical memory?

That's exactly what it does.

Except instead of the game having to manage loading / swapping textures in and out, directx10/vista manages it.

You might be able to make a case for GPU multitasking,

"might"??! There is no good reason why we wouldn't want to have multiple processes running in full acceleration in their own windows.

but only bad things can come of virtual video memory.

1) Why should each game need to manage its own texture memory paging when the OS can do it.

2) How can we have gpu multitasking if one application can allocate all the video memory, leaving none for the other applications, and worse, the OS can't swap it out, because the OS doesn't manage it.

Inserting the OS between the application and the video card does slow it down slightly, but the trade off is worth it in terms of extra flexibility, stability, and functionality. You wouldn't want to go back to the good old days where each program talked directly with the printer, directly with the keyboard, directly with the hard disk, allocated all the RAM in the system for itself and then used its own memory manager internally... sure the performance was a bit better under that regime, but we couldn't have a proper multitasking OS if we stuck with it.

And that's what directx10/vista gives us that windows XP can't. In XP the video card is still handed over to the application by the OS in its entirety, in Vista multiple applications can use it simultaneously, because vista/directx10 mediates access to the gpu and its video memory.

This is a good thing (tm). This is something Vista does right.