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.

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.