Part of the changes in Vista that Mark Russinovich had touted with Vista was that media files were purposely given priority in playback, so that the choppiness and stutter could be made to disappear from the machines that Vista was used on. Much was made of this feature, and it was given great amounts of space, to explain why the kernel was changed in this way.

Now, with everyone on the planet not owning a quad core CPU with double digit gigabytes of local memory, it seems that part of the Service Pack 1 ‘repairs’ is to at least partially negate this emphasis on media performance, because the great majority of users have noted what porcine performance Vista has when accessing a network.

Now the Service Pack will allow the user to choose where the compromise should be, media playback or network performance. Apparently the throttling mechanism will be almost continuously variable, which will allow for good performance of the most important things.

This is a plus for users, but it is odd that other operating systems have better CPU optimizations, and are much more lean, allowing better performance, and less need for these choices.

Perhaps a return to more low level coding, and less .NET, could bring the kind of performance that Microsoft had in mind, when waxing on about the virtues of Vista.

-

[tags] Vista, media optimization, network throttling index, network performance [/tags]

Share this post :