Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[mmoy]

I never used Win98 though I did use Windows XP. My opinion is
that Windows XP was slower because it was a real operating
system and has the overhead of a real operating system.

The thing that I hated about Windows 98/ME is that there was no
process memory protection. If you had an application that that
had a bug or two where it wrote into the process space of another
program or system memory, you could crash an application or
your system. I had a set of applications that degraded slowly
over the work day so that I needed a reboot mid-afternoon of the
system or it would hang and crash.

I come from a VMS (V+1 = W, M+1 = N, S+1 = T - Dave Cutler joke)
background and using XP had a lot in common with VMS under the
covers so my expectation was that it would be slower. Remember
that in a real operating system, you want all system service
calls to be checked for privileges and most applications use
a lot of system service calls (GUI).

I went to the Vista web site last night and was trying to figure out how to get the Beta or the December CTP. It might be an MSDN thing though I thought that I read somewhere that others could get it to. If it was an easy download, I was going to start it last night and try an installation over the weekend.

I haven't read the technical papers on what has been added to
Vista that makes it so resource hungry and it is very difficult
to have an informed opinion without understanding the underpinnings and costs of the technology.

I did read a little about the development environment and Microsoft appears to be very eager to get developers on board developing applications for Vista which is apparently different than developing applications for just plain XP. It will be interesting to see if Vista-only applications start showing up next year.