As always, I’m just reporting what I’ve seen. Check this out:
http://techgage.com/review.php?id=5175
In early Alphas of Longhorn, it merely resembled Windows XP with a gray skin. Since that time though, things have changed drastically, and Vista Beta 2 is nothing like the system was even two years ago. The original goals are still there, but since that time, more have
been added.One thing that each new beta of Vista has proven well to do, is become more system intensive than the last. The Aero Glass feature alone can be responsible for eating up over 100MB of ram. The OS in general is quite bulky, especially the Ultimate, which makes people wonder how they are supposed to run it at release. After a fresh WinXP install, you can usually expect near 30 processes to be running, but in Vista, that number skyrockets to 40+. Not only are there more processes though, but each one takes a significant amount of ram.
In the picture above, you can see the processes after I closed everything I didn’t need. The DWM.exe is what’s responsible for the desktop windows, which takes a lovely 50MB by itself. If you turn off the Aero Glass theme, that figure goes down to below 10MB.
While this doesn’t seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t. However, when you want to get into system intensive applications, it may be. Microsoft is already recommending no less than 1GB for use with Vista, and I personally wouldn’t recommend anything under 2GB if you plan to be doing any gaming. As mentioned in our 4GB memory article last month, companies like OCZ are readying themselves to release 4GB kits of ram. So, it’s not hard to understand that Vista is gearing up to require a very beefy machine.
Not only will the OS test your memory and CPU, it will also require a good video card that supports DX9. Simply running Fraps in Vista will tell you that the entire environment is being rendered, because it actually will keep a FPS counter in the corner, as it would in a game. Do we really need to go to an accelerated environment for an operating system though? I am doubtful, but it sure does look pretty.
Check out the memory usage in this picture:
944M just for basic system software? Wow, that’s just pitiful. And what’s the benefit? It looks pretty?
Next: he does a bunch of performance benchmarks and comes to this conclusion:
Most of our benchmarks proved one thing… and that’s that current Windows is faster than what Vista can provide. The tested computer is not outdated by any means, but Vista did not work as seamlessly as I would hope by this point in time. The biggest issue lies within games. It’s no surprise… gaming suffered a lot on the new platform. Even after closing many services and turning off themes, games still did not come close to Windows XP performance. If this is how things are going to be, WinXP will long remain the top OS until people are forced to move to Vista due to DX10 or other technologies.
I don’t see any compelling reasons to switch to Vista. How about you fanboys?