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Well, let's talk performance! The Devil Mountain Software company, via the exo blog have recently made available the statistics generated following a series of benchmarking tests, featuring Vista SP1 Release Candidate Preview and XP SP3 Release Candidate. The conclusions were that XP SP3 leaves Vista SP1 in the dust in terms of performance. Although it is a tad early to draw the line on the performances of both service packs since the releases are still in RC stage, the conclusions presented pointed to the fact that XP SP3 is twice as fast

While Vista SP1 and XP SP3 had been thrown one against the other in the same arena, there was little information provided on the actual parameters of the benchmarking tests beyond the system configuration of the machine used: "Dell XPS M1710 test bed with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM and discrete nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video," according to the Devil Mountain Software company.

"So did they turn off things like the pre-loading of applications, was this a fresh PC or one where the inbuilt tools could optimise themselves? Did they turn off new features like anti-spyware and search engine, the graphics etc? You can't add a bundle of new features and get it all for free - they have to load and boot up time is the most likely time," explained David Overton, Microsoft Small Business Specialist.

Now on his blog, Overton does mention the fact that the opinion expressed are his own, and not Micrsoft's. But it's likely that the Redmond company was sharing his frustration. Next, Overton addressed the system configuration, with a particular focus on RAM. The emphasis is that of Overton.

The tests involved "a Vista machine with the recommended MINIMUM amount of RAM, but XP with eight times it's minimum recommended. Microsoft clearly recognised that Vista's new features require more memory, as do Office, so they have one machine that is 5 years skinny on features and another that has 5 years worth of extra features and security built in. Come on. What about trying it on a 2GB machine, or one that the tests have been run on a hundred times so the optimisation engines in Vista can get to work. I've done benchmarking as a job

The fact of the matter is that the Devil Mountain Software company did run the test with 2 GB of system memory instead of 1 GB, and Vista SP1 still underperformed in comparison with XP SP3. And it is true that Windows XP, released at the end of 2001 would fly on 1 GB of RAM when it's minimum system requirements demand drastically less resources. Yet, by the same approach, we should in fact forget about the fact that Vista is guaranteed to run with just 1 GB of RAM and feed up to 8 GB to a 64-bit version in order to get real performance...