Why Windows Vista isn't ready for geeks

Published March 19, 2007

This article was supposed to be about streamlining Vista. My goal was to poke through the registry, service list, control panel and computer management panel to find, document and tweak anything that would make Vista run a little bit better and then benchmark 3D programs on a streamlined copy of Vista against XP. However, I've been thwarted. Games wouldn't run, applications wouldn't install, and a slew of Vista options could not be disabled even if it would've helped the PC's performance or my sanity; it all just went to hell.

I do not have a slouch of a computer, and the following hardware yielded a 5.6 out of 6.0 on the Windows Experience Index:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 running at E6750 speeds (a "safe" speed, as opposed to the 3GHz+ I usually run it at)
2GB OCZ PC-8000 Platinum (at 1000MHz DDR)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
Asus P5B-Deluxe

The peripherals are all SATA DVD burners and disks, eliminating the need for any legacy hardware controllers. Essentially, it's a very fast and ultra-modern PC. Again, it's no slouch, and it had no trouble running the pretty parts of Vista, nor does it have issues running any game I've tossed at it when I run XP. Running those games on Vista, on the other hand, was like trying to turn the sky purple.

Where did my troubles begin?

Installation

Partitions

The average user's system won't have multiple operating system partitions. Despite this, any serious OS shouldn't have an issue supporting it. Unfortunately, that seemed like a tall order for Vista.

My computer's storage consists of a single Western Digital 320GB SATA-II hard drive with three partitions:

Partition 0 (C:\) - Windows XP, 5GB (Flagged as a primary partition)
Partition 1 (D:\) - Storage, 278GB (Flagged as an extended partition)
Partition 2 (E:\) - Windows Vista, 15GB (Flagged now as a primary partition)

Prior to this article, E:\ was simply a blank and unformatted section of disk space that I kept for experiments such as this or my secret and short-lived affair with Ubuntu Linux. Suffice it to say, installing Windows Vista on my hard drive required me to format the partition to do anything else. That's where the trouble began. Upon formatting the 15GB free space that Windows Vista would go to, the Vista installer tossed up a BSOD that was so brief I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Streamlining Windows Vista

While we were ultimately unable to test the results of our streamlining process, we did manage to document all the changes we made to the operating system to reduce the memory footprint by nearly 200MB on a fresh boot, as well as reducing the page file impact from 607MB to 368MB, both of which are considerable physical and virtual memory savings.

The biggest sin of Vista's bloat comes in the form of 125 system services, a large majority of which come enabled on a fresh installation, which would explain why a fresh boot of Vista after installation had 532MB or 26% of my available memory taken just to run itself. The minor issues come in the form of the sheer processor overhead required to maintain these services, and the Windows Sidebar which took up to 40MB of RAM to run the default gadgets.

THE FULL ARTICLE @ ICONTRIC

{mos_fb_discuss:44}

Galway Computer Club