Vista or XP?

[Gonzo]

I thought it was the DRM slowing things down, not indexing....

I am not at all "technical" so I don't really understand what is going on but if you look at a drive's properties under "My Computer" there is an option to "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching".

Pasting files took forever on the Vista machine until I turned that option off.

On my XP machines it is switched on but there are no performance issues with those.

Note - there are probably more elegant methods of achieving the desired result. I am the last person that should be giving out technical advice.

[VectraMan]

According to Mark Russinovich there are some performance and scalability improvements in the Windows 7 kernel. Having used it for the last few weeks it does appear to be much quicker than Vista from what I've seen so far.

Interesting stuff, though most of what he's talking about is for the high end. He even says of the one gain it'll be negligible with less than 32 cores - not a problem I have yet.

Is it faster, or is it the new OS factor? I've started developing on my Vista laptop and it seems faster than my old XP desktop, but I suspect that's more to do with my desktop being full of crap, and my laptop having been barely used from new, than anything to do with the OSs.

[voodooflux]

Interesting stuff, though most of what he's talking about is for the high end. He even says of the one gain it'll be negligible with less than 32 cores - not a problem I have yet.

Yeah, the spin lock improvements aren't something I'm going to see anytime soon Although from what I recall the memory management improvements he mentions should have an immediate impact.

Is it faster, or is it the new OS factor? I've started developing on my Vista laptop and it seems faster than my old XP desktop, but I suspect that's more to do with my desktop being full of crap, and my laptop having been barely used from new, than anything to do with the OSs.

I'm convinced it's faster - I approached it with cautious trepidation but from the word go I was impressed with how responsive it feels. Stuff like UAC prompts just seem to kick in much quicker. In hindsight I should have run some benchmarks on the previous Vista installation before I switched to Windows 7 really.

[blacjac]

I am not at all "technical" so I don't really understand what is going on but if you look at a drive's properties under "My Computer" there is an option to "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching".

Pasting files took forever on the Vista machine until I turned that option off.

On my XP machines it is switched on but there are no performance issues with those.

Note - there are probably more elegant methods of achieving the desired result. I am the last person that should be giving out technical advice.

I'll have to give that a go, thanks.