Vista and Application Speed: Somehow, It Feels Less Clunky

[Jason Dunn]

Here's a scenario I'm sure most of you have run into when running Windows XP: your single-core CPU will be pegged to 100% by an application (let's say video encoding), you'll try to open up your Web browser or another application....and odds are you'll be staring at a white window while the explorer.exe process fights for CPU cycles with the other application. Or you might see partial screen re-draws as the system struggles to respond to your commands. It's just plain ugly.

I don't know the all technical reasons why, but in my tests of Vista Ultimate, I've found it to be much more responsive when under heavy load. For instance, if I'm encoding a video using Windows Movie Maker and the CPU is chugging away at 100% use, I can still open up Internet Explorer 7 - it opens almost as fast as if the system is under no load, and the visual experience is 100% perfect - no partial screen re-draws, no visual "tearing". Visually, things look correct because Vista is using the GPU and DirectX to draw the desktop, which results in more stability and less reliance on the CPU. It's cool from a geeky perspective to be able to use the Windows Key+TAB to visually cycle through the programs fluidly while the CPU is grinding away on video encoding.

Vista seems to also be better at prioritizing user input commands - such as starting a new program - even when under heavy load. I've heard people say that Vista only works "properly" with multi-core CPUs, but when you consider I'm doing this on an overclocked 3.36 Ghz Celeron D CPU (http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/index.php?topic_id=11607), that's definitely not the case. Granted, I'm sure it would be even better on a multi-core CPU and I'm looking forward to that scenario... :D

[mcsouth]

Here's a scenario I'm sure most of you have run into when running Windows XP: your single-core CPU will be pegged to 100% by an application (let's say video encoding), you'll try to open up your Web browser or another application....and odds are you'll be staring at a white window while the explorer.exe process fights for CPU cycles with the other application. Or you might see partial screen re-draws as the system struggles to respond to your commands. It's just plain ugly.

I'll agree that is plain ugly......and I see it enough to know from practical experience. What's really bad is when you aren't actually intentionally running a CPU intensive application, and this starts happening.....and you wait for several minutes before you can finally get the Task manager up to find out what guilty application is beating the crap out of your PC......and then you wait for several minutes before the "Kill process" command actually registers in order to get rid of the problem.

I will admit that I have occasionally reached the point of no longer caring about potential data loss and held the power key down until my laptop physically powered off in order to kill a rogue process (like the network driven virus scan at work! or the Windows Indexing Service!!!) I will admit that Win XP is MUCH better than prior Win 9x versions at allowing a graceful recovery, but there are still times that even the three fingered salute has failed to get attention, and killing the power has been the only recourse!