To quote an article "Windows Vista is a bloated pig of an operating system. In fact, compared to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3, Vista requires roughly twice the hardware resources to deliver comparable performance."
You apparently like Vista, I don't. I belive the marketplace tends to agree with me, as Vista was bluntly refused by the marketplace. IMHO, MSFT is in a very tenuous place. They came out with WinME, which was a colossal mess. Shortly thereafter, MSFT came out with WinXP. People who dropped money to upgrade from Win2K and bought that POS, WinME, felt that they had been cheated. And rightly so, WinME should never have seen the light of day. Much the same can (and has been) said for Vista. Win7 apparetnly is, what Vista was supposed to be. This goes right back to 'Quality'.
Where WinXP would allow applications to run in 'emulation mode', Vista does not. What do we gain, by dropping something that allowed legacy hardware and software run on our machiens? Basically, we traded legitimate needs for some fluff (Aero) while we lost something commonly used in most offices, Instant Messenger. (You do know that Instant Messanger is missing essential APIs so it crashes under Vista, without regard to SP releases, don't you?)
Superprefetch is really a misnomer. The South Bridge chip usually maintains a pre-fetch register that is capable of holding 2-8 quadwords. This 'should' be handled in hardware, not software. The entire point of 'pre-fetch' is to prevent unnecessary latency while the hardware negotiates to talk to memory, or HDD. Still, WinXP has pre-fetching turned on - and I have yet to see a benchmark comparing WinXP to Vista's pre-fetch routine.
The last point is that your 4/8 Gig statement. Go ahead and load 8 Gig in your 32 bit machine if that makes you feel good. The fact is that depending upon your BIOS, you will only see about 3-3.5 Gig. 32 Bits only allows you access to 4 Gig. For the 64 bit machines, you can go a bit larger, but what percentage of users have more than 2 Gig in their PC?
*When MSFT releases a new OS, vendors are given over a year to come up with a driver, which is generally included in the OEM and retail OS disk. MSFT did not include these drivers in their disk (ie. missing ICD for OpenGL). This lead to workstations that could for all intensive purposes, no longer run AutoCAD, OrCAD, and a host of other OpenGL applications.*
Funny - when I install Vista the included nVidia driver and ATI driver support OGL out of the box.
*Where WinXP would allow applications to run in ‘emulation mode’, Vista does not.*
Yes it does.
*Superprefetch is really a misnomer. The South Bridge chip usually maintains a pre-fetch register that is capable of holding 2-8 quadwords. This ‘should’ be handled in hardware, not software. The entire point of ‘pre-fetch’ is to prevent unnecessary latency while the hardware negotiates to talk to memory, or HDD. Still, WinXP has pre-fetching turned on - and I have yet to see a benchmark comparing WinXP to Vista’s pre-fetch routine.*
Now that shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
“SuperFetch is a technology that pre-loads commonly used applications into memory to reduce their load times. It’s based on the “prefetcher” function in Windows XP.[8]
The intent is to improve performance in situations where running an anti-virus scan or back-up utility would result in otherwise recently-used information being paged out to disk, or disposed from in-memory caches, resulting in lengthy delays when a user comes back to their computer after a period of non-use.
SuperFetch also keeps track of what times of day that applications are used, which allows it to intelligently pre-load information that is expected to be used in the near future.”