Vista, technical questions

if we believe this test : http://rainrecording.co.uk/vista/performance
Vista fucking outperforms XP. But I don't like to rely on benchmarks found on the internet. But this is true that the graphical interface is now managed by the gpu and so let the processor disponible for other tasks.
I'd like to have thoughts and advices from people (professional or not) about audio in general and Vista.
- Does Vista really manage better multi-cores ?
- What about memory management that has been horrible, until now, XP included ?
- the new sound API, how is it ? Will there be a problem with asio4all ?
- and of course, software compatibility and stability in general, if you regret to have migrated from XP or not.

1. true if you use aero. vista gets more sluggish when you disable aero.
2.i don't know. i guess not.
3. rephrase your question.
4. nothing to write home about.
5. google it.
6. if an older program works on older windows but not vista, you can be pretty sure that the program's company uses shitty practises. installing older programs in vista is the best way to find out which companies have faulty development practises. these are generally the ones that needlessly require an admin account to operate and the ones that rely on bugs found in older windows versions.
7. my computer came with it. it's adequate for me and most people are ignorant idiots.

>>2
"my computer came with it. it's adequate for me and most people are ignorant idiots."
Yes this is why I asked specific questions, so I can avoid, trolls and their fud. Well this is a goodstart, thanks for your answers. Which question you didn't understand (sorry for my bad english) ?

Thanks!  Keeping the cat from sleeping on it may be the biggest problem!

>memory management that has been horrible, until now, XP included

What exactly is so horrible about NT's memory management?


>Will there be a problem with asio4all ?

Yes. Asio4all is a horribly dirty hack. Those don't work on Vista any more because of those new "security" features.


>stability in general

Stability is about the same as all NT4 based systems. It's good if you don't experiment with drivers and you have to schedule the occasional reboot. Sorry, still no years of uptime for Windows servers.

Apart from that, it's essentially the same as XP, only your computer will feel like it's one year older than it really is and you might have to tool around with an application or two to get them to work.

Multicore support is crap on XP, the scheduler doesn't play well with two or more cores and constantly juggles processes between them instead of actually doing work. In the case of AMD they had to release a patch to actually fix the timings just so the cores wouldn't "fight" over processes. Vista does a far better job of balancing the load between them, and the task manager comes built with the ability to isolate applications to specific cores without having to use a 3rd party program.

The new sound API is fine if you don't want to reuse an older soundcard. I have a cheapo Audigy SE because Foxconn's onboard sucked, and when I switched to Vista EAX support was killed and the drivers are crap. When sound is playing occasionally I get a system wide freeze that lasts for 10 seconds thanks to Creative's lack of care for the budget cards. Thats actually the only compliant I have with Vista, aside form the DRM bullshit which is easily countered.

Stability was shoddy when first released just like with XP, but now that drivers are catching up it's not really an issue. Some games still suck, STALKER runs like ass and Oblivion has frequent pauses but with newer updates it's getting better. Only programs I couldn't get to run were like 3DMark 2001 so no loss. Most of the older hardware like printers are supported natively; a shitty Dynex wifi card that wouldn't work under XP with it's crap drivers runs perfectly in Vista with the standard Microsoft ones. Another good point is you don't have to reformat every few months due to a sluggish OS. Vista's been running just as snappy as the day I installed it for 7 months now.

>>5
"What exactly is so horrible about NT's memory management?"
Well, I have a Q6600 with 2G of ram, and apart from when I use really big apps, XP is unable to use all the ram available, it stucks at 512M of use and prefer to swap to disk whenever I use multiple little applications, compared to *nix systems, it really fails hard on this point. But it seems that Vista is going the same way as its concurrent now(prefetch for example), in a different manner though.

>>6
Thank you for all these informations, I'm not surprised at all about multiple cores management, after all XP is too old to have been made with this in mind. About the soundcards, I'm aware of this problem, but since I planned to buy a new one (along with all my hardware recently) I just have to choose the new one with precautions. And the fact that you don't have to reinstall periodically the system is a plus too.
Finally, since Vista is really exepensive (in France it's twice the price of America's) I will take my time to take a decision, will test it in a virtual machine and if I'm conviced, wait for the SP1 to migrate.
If others want to share their thoughts and experiences, they are still welcome.

>>7
>multiple cores management, after all XP is too old to have been made with this in mind

Faggot, what the fuck are you talking about? NT4 was made with multiple CPUs in mind. XP is based on that.