Vista SP1 and XP SP3 gaming comparison

[Noreen]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2303830,00.asp

[Rik]

I still think 7 will be the OS that Vista was meant to be.

[vitriol]

Interesting read 

[vitriol]

anyone here installed xp sp3 yet? any comments?

[Simon]

Yes and no.    IOW, all seems fine. 

[Sebby]

Interesting article. What amazes me is that it seems as if Vista is good "under the hood". So why's it so sluggish on the surface?

anyone here installed xp sp3 yet? any comments?

I slipstreamed it. Nothing to report, other than everything is working as well as it always did.

[Dangerjunkie]

Hi,

Running SP3 here on 2 machines. I don't use it that much (I'm in Linux mostly) but so far it's not given me any cause for concern. I run SecondLife a lot and I've certainly not seen any significant decrease in stability or 3D performance.

Interesting article. What amazes me is that it seems as if Vista is good "under the hood". So why's it so sluggish on the surface?

The problem is down to the DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management.) MS have stuck loads of things in to try and brown nose the entertainment industry. A Vista Premium machine checks you video and sound devices 30 times a second to check you're not trying to steal music or movies because they think all users are thieving <insert expletive of choice here>

The net result is huge amounts of wasted speed and a significant increase in CO2 emissions for all the power to do it.

Cheers,
Paul.

[Sebby]

Also, I found that disabling indexing and SuperFetch made a huge difference in performance. In fact, it was pretty quick. Why introduce features that are meant to speed things up that actually slow things down? Bizarre.

[Dangerjunkie]

Probably two of the features that speed things up for the "average" user. Unfortunately we're not average and then there's the standard MS behaviour of deciding what the customer wants then when the customer says "well, that's not what I want" the response is "well, what's wrong with your requirements then?"

[vitriol]

I'll install SP3 tonight if I get the chance.

[BrianM]

 Hi!  I installed sp3 on my windows xp3  Evesham 3 years old  desktop pc a couple of months ago from MS website, have had no problems at all. The whole process took about 30 -35 minutes.  At times i thought the download had stalled (on a few ooccasions),  i didn't interupt the process but waited until the next prompts until completion, i think patience may be one of the requirements for success and just let things run their course. Let's know how you get on vitriol. 
Brian.