Technology Attention Deficit Disorder (TADD). That’s the only plausible explanation for the complete lack of perspective demonstrated by respondents to my recent post on Windows “Workstation” 2008. After months of posting about the myriad advantages of running Server 2008 as a desktop OS (it’s faster, more stable, faster, more configurable, faster and ... faster!) - I’m still presented with questions about “why” someone would want to do this.
Hint: It’s the performance, stupid!
And now I find that this TADD “halo” affect is spreading outward to encompass portions of the blogosphere itself. In yet another example of ZDNet ripping off my ideas for fun and profit, Mr. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes gets all “angsty” over the thought that users might actually be falling for some of this “Workstation” 2008 nonsense – and, by extension, paints those of us who are promoting the “Workstation” 2008 idea as liars.
Never mind the fact that I already wrote about the detailed benchmark results proving that Windows Server 2008 outperforms Windows Vista on identical hardware. That was months ago, and we all know that the TADD crowd has trouble paying attention during those boring test results discussions.
Note to Adrian: Try Strattera. It worked wonders for that frumpy chick in the TV commercial!
As for the rest of you, it’s time to set the record straight regarding Windows desktop performance. And please, try to pay attention this time – I hate having to repeat myself!
Vista vs. XP – Windows XP is ~40% faster than Windows Vista on identical hardware. This isn’t an estimate. It’s the raw performance delta that engineers over at the exo.performance.network (www.xpnet.com) measured while testing Windows XP (SP3) vs. Windows Vista (SP1).
Now, before you blow off the numbers as being tied to Aero or indexing or some other extraneous Vista bloat factor, you need to take a look at the methodology: The lab engineers who ran the tests did everything possible to make Vista run faster. This included turning off Aero, disabling a host of background services and making Vista look and run just like XP in almost every respect. And yet, despite all of this tuning and tweaking, Vista was still roughly 40% slower than XP on the same hardware.
