Need some measurement here
This might be a topic for one of the El Regulars (like Cade or Tony) to dig into...
Are the problems more prevalent on new purchase hardware with Vista pre-installed, or is it evenly spread over the new and self-upgraded hardware?
Although I uninstalled Vista nearly a year ago, in the brief period I was using it I had no performance issues to speak of. A LOT of incompatibility, specifically with mission-critical, high-dollar business or technical packages - but nothing like the problems listed in these many articles.
My best friend, a MS-certified data center architect, has 4 Vista platforms running at home with no problems, ranging from Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Opteron gaming monsters running the 64 bit version with the MS VM support to an old Gateway convertible with a 1.5 GHz Pentium M. All are running Vista Ultimate, as was I.
In both our cases we did a "blank disk" install from the retail "OEM" installation media (multipack license) on existing platforms we were already running XP or Linux. In other words, swap in a new hard drive and do the install from scratch.
So far, my friends and family that have purchased brand new machines with Vista pre-installed have encountered numerous problems in both installation and operation, including the copy performance problems cited in the article.
Now, this is anecdotal, empirical analysis, but it seems the common thread here is vendors with "bad" installation images for some of their products.This does not surprise me, as there are constant updates to the hardware in systems within a single model from the "big" vendors, or even complete chipset changes within a major model release. If the install image for a model family isn't updated, it would be possible to get kernel images that are incorrectly built for the hardware. If ANYTHING works at all, it's probably running in "compatibility" mode - meaning just one step above "safe" mode. No DMA, no ACPI, reduced clock speeds all around, etc. This COULD explain the continuous problems people have.
Of course, if you take a tweaked installation of Linux or Mac OS and run it on a different chipset platform, you'll experience the same issues.
So, would one of you El Reg folks look into this and report?
Muchas Gracias!