Vista isn't ready for non-office use
Drivers - the fun of
Anyone who plays with their computers' hardware knows the fun of drivers. Driver conflicts, driver updates, upgrading, rolling back, compatibility - all these words make me want to cry. Drivers love to cause problems and manufacturers love to take their time resolving them, meaning the drivers for Vista currently are fairly remedial and new, which makes me think that performance and stability are adversely affected.
Gaming
While a friend of mine has been (almost) happily playing Counter Strike on Vista there's an excellent article written on PCPerspective (Windows Vista Gaming Performance - NVIDIA and ATI Compared) which outlines how far behind XP the graphics driver performance is currently. It makes interesting reading for those of us who like to play games now and then.
Of course this situation is unlikely to improve at any great speed while Nvidia and ATi continue releasing new cards as if compelled by some higher power.
Sound
Companies like Creative aren't known for being swift with their drivers and Vista has been no exception. Back when I played with Vista RC1 the driver support for my Creative Xtreme Music card was non-existent and I'd be very reluctant to journey to Vista if my sound needs couldn't be met to an equal or higher quality than XP. My sound quality is that important, I see no justification in having THx certified speakers and an advanced sound card when your operating system is unable to utilise them correctly. While I've not seen anything to support my concerns I've not read anything disproving them either and being a sound purist, I need a guarantee that quality is going to be maintained.
General performance
TomsHardware have a good set of benchmarks on Vista and the conclusion was that it's performance was distinctly underwhelming when compared to the same setup on XP. Most notably were the CPU-intensive applications, which were ~20% slower on Microsoft's "greatest" offering. Gaming performance is down, media encoding is down, general application use seems to be slower too according to TH so why bother with Vista?
Conclusions
It seems obscene to spend several hundred pounds to reduce your performance because I'd happily do that for anyone for at least half the price. I'd happily visit your home and reduce your FSB (front side bus) frequency if that's what you want to pay for, but until then I think I'll be waiting for sensible prices, assurances of audio quality and decent drivers, if it's all the same to you. XP is the only operating system that's able to offer me all of those at this moment in time and that's why the majority of my computing is done on it.
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