Articles about Windows Vista typically focus on descriptions of the problems and bugs experienced when using the operating system. Looking at the real proposed advantages of Vista and doing a few web searches on these features yields their own negatives as well.
To be fair, all of these features theoretically have their good points, which may or may not translate into real benefits when implemented. This article is nothing more than a examination of the negative sides of these features, nothing more.
Windows Vista Features
(Real technical features, not these “WOW” features”)
By the way, the WOW features are better described here.
Rewritten Audio Stack
Breaks Creative Labs EAX (environmental audio) New drivers only good for absolute latest creative sound cards
“Even if your sound card supports EAX, DirectSound no longer has access to the drivers to even detect its presence, let alone send commands through to it.
IPv6 and other network enhancements
“Will Vista stall Net traffic?”
“Vista may cause an increase in DNS traffic, but not to the extent predicted by Mockapetris, Microsoft countered…Others agree that Vista could cause a spike in DNS traffic. But they’re not expecting dire consequences. ”
Online game performance worse in Windows Vista than XP
“Nearly every enhancement of the new Vista Stack is focused on TCP/IP throughput improvement, instead of UDP/IP latency improvement (which would help online games)”.
“Another test was conducted by bypassing the networking stack on both Windows XP and Vista using LLR Technology with a Killer NIC network card. Yet again, the data showed the Vista network stack is inferior to the XP stack. Bypassing the Vista network stack yielded larger benefits in performance than bypassing the XP networking stack. ”
New Startup system (no NTLDR)
Why Windows Vista is not ready for geeks
“Booting back from the Vista disc, Vista had indeed carved out the 15GB I had requested, but it also saw fit to randomly swap partition types of C:\ and D:\.”
“Partition 1 was now flagged as the primary boot partition, and Partition 0 was now flagged as an extended partition. This means that the BOOT.INI file nestled in C:\ referred to a primary partition that no longer existed, and boot files that were no longer valid because there was no master boot record on that partition to access. Windows Vista had rendered my Windows XP installation unbootable”
Windows Display Driver Model
“Performance-wise, developers can expect a decrease of around 10-15% on Windows as compared to Windows XP. Applications that use problematic cases (for example, excessive flushing, or rendering to the frontbuffer, as explained later) can see a larger performance degradation. However, expect this gap to become smaller over time while the graphics hardware vendors work on further optimizing their Windows Vista WDDM drivers.”
“WDDM’s increased memory footprint and new video memory manager approach may worsen resource-hungry scenarios. Applications which were already pushing the limits of memory consumption on Windows XP, just barely fitting, may fall off a performance cliff on Windows Vista. This is due to excessive thrashing because available system and/or video memory is now exhausted.”
SuperFetch
Why does Vista use all my memory?
” Vista is trying its darndest to pre-emptively populate every byte of system memory with what it thinks I might need next. It’s running a low-priority background task that harvests previously accessed data from the disk and plops it into unused system memory.”
“Although I am a total believer in the system-memory-as-cache religion, SuperFetch can still have some undesirable side effects. I first noticed that something was up when I fired up Battlefield 2 under Vista and joined a multiplayer game. Battlefield 2 is something of a memory hog; the game regularly uses a gigabyte of memory on large 64-player multiplayer maps. During the first few minutes of gameplay, I noticed that the system was a little sluggish, and the drive was running constantly. This was very unusual and totally unlike the behavior under Windows XP. Once the map is loaded and you join the game, the entire game is in memory. What could possibly be loading from disk at that point? Well, SuperFetch saw a ton of memory freed to make room for the game, and dutifully went about filling the leftover free memory on a low-priority background disk thread. Normally, this would be no big deal, but even a low-priority background disk thread is pretty noticeable when you’re playing a twitch shooter online with 63 other people at a resolution of 1600×1200.”
‘I’m skeptical of this feature, personally. It sounds like it will work great for the typical user who runs a lot of small apps - Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, Outlook, even maybe Photoshop. But it looks like it could perform terribly when running high-memory apps, like games as you yourself discovered, or media production software (routinely use 1-2 gigs for me), or even Visual Studio.”
ReadyBoost & ReadyDrive
Is Vista Heading for a Flash Nightmare?
Vista And the Rise of the Flash Drive
“I was at Lexar and M-Systems for a number of years and now consult to the flash memory industry. Conversations I’ve had with my contacts at Intel lead me to believe that ReadyDrive is a quick fix until “Robson” flash appears on motherboards next year.”
“Speed: ReadyBoost only caches small random reads to the pagefile. Under these conditions, flash memory outperforms hard disk drives. For large sequential reads, hard drives will always win.”
“Adding more memory is better than using ReadyBoost.”
ReadyBoot
(Good idea, but soon eclipsed by better hardware implementation which works with everything)
Flash Memory: Today the iPod, Tomorrow the World?
“Samsung, which makes both hard drives and flash memory, is adding flash memory directly to its hard drives, said Don Barnetson, associate director for flash memory marketing at Samsung Electronics. ”
“A hybrid hard drive with a relatively small amount of flash—as little as 128MB—can cut the power consumption of drive by about 95 percent, giving notebooks as much as an extra 30 minutes of battery life, while also reducing the boot time of Windows XP to as little as 15 seconds, Barnetson said. ”
“Intel has been working on a somewhat different hard drive-flash memory hybrid it calls Robson Technology. Robson, which thus far has used flash memory packaged into a module that fits into a slot on a notebook’s motherboard, uses standard NAND flash memory from numerous manufacturers, together with a PC’s hard drive….Robson will work in any type of PC and with several operating systems, including Windows and Linux,
Games Explorer
Vista Casts a Pall on PC Gaming
“any game that registers with Game Explorer becomes “subject” to Vista parental controls which will proceed to block the game from running and offer to delete the link to the game if you try to run it from anywhere on the system other than within the Game Explorer.”
“The heavy handed implementation of parental controls presents several problems for PC game developers. First, most free family and casual games are “unrated” because the ESRB rating service, designed for multimillion dollar boxed titles, is too expensive for most small casual game developers. Any parent concerned enough about the games their kids are downloading online to use Vista’s parental control system are likely to block “unrated” content and break most family appropriate content that can be found online. Note that Vista’s parental control system does not apply to web games and is not accessible from the browser so parents who expect them to protect their kids from “all” online game content may be in for a shock.”
Parental Controls
Vista Security Overview: Too Little Too Late
“Now there is some good news, finally. Vista ships with parental controls that are reasonably easy to implement. You can set up accounts for the kiddies, and prevent them using all sorts of programs, like email, chat, and IM, or even deny them internet access altogether if they’re too young. One thing that I like is the ability to prevent the little porn fiends from downloading files via IE7. But remember, if you have any other browsers loaded on the system, you must disable them all individually via the parental controls, because download blocking only works with IE.”
Address space layout randomization
Vista Security Overview: Too Little Too Late
“Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a feature from XP SP2 that shuts down programs that handle memory oddly, and it is now set to full on by default. It works with address space layout randomisation, a new feature in Vista that loads some system code in unpredictable memory locations to defend against buffer overflow attacks. Both are very good ideas, and should help reduce the impact of malware to some extent.”
“However, DEP, when full on, may cause a number of applications to crash, or interfere with their installation. I’m betting that a majority of users will opt for the more conservative setting, and this of course means less defense for everyone.”
Network Access Protection
(great idea, but not a feature of Windows Vista. Not available until Loghorn is released, and at that time will be available for Windows XP)
Vista’s Network Access Protection
“NAP support is included with Vista and Longhorn Server, and a NAP client for Windows XP with SP2 is expected to be available when Longhorn Server is released. The XP NAP client is in beta testing at the time of this writing.”
“The NAP platform consists of a number of components working together:
* The Network Policy Server (NPS). This is a Longhorn Server…”
NAC competition: Microsoft’s Network Access Protection
“Rather than try and send Statements of Health around at authentication time, a client proves its health to the Health Certificate Server using normal System Health Agents and Statements of Health. It then receives a digital certificate that it can use instead of normal user credentials for authentication using 802.1X or IPSec.”
“The benefits of this complex system of using Health Certificates are not clear. It’s likely the goal is to increase perceived performance by separating out the work of determining system health from actually connecting to network resources. Whether this perception will be worth the increase in complexity and decrease in security is a difficult call to make at this stage in the NAC product life cycle.”