Don’t Give Up on Vista. Don’t Give Up on Vista. (I love that Mac commercial…)

If you have Vista installed and are contemplating a switch back to XP, hang out a bit before you go.  You may want to rethink that move.  Vista SP1 is going to come out soon, and it fixes some huge problems that have been plaguing  a number of people.

I saw a very interesting article on ZDNet today that spoke of triple the network file transfer speeds.  Very, very cool and very interesting as well.  According to this report, the information about SP1 having no performance gains was inaccurate, due to the benchmarking methods that were used.

Apparently, problems with the networking stack in the RTM version of Vista have been corrected.  When connecting to XP workstations, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Home Server, internal network speeds from Vista boxes are negatively effected.  The three XP based OS’ all share common, core network components.

I’m going to bottom line things here for everyone, as I don’t want to specifically snag the content from the article (so not right…) File transfer speeds can be anywhere from 2.5 – 3.0 times faster than the RTM version.

Microsoft thinks that the issue was caused by a design change in Vista that eliminated the buffering used by the XP code base. "Bypassing the cache read-aheads and deferred writes makes for better disk-to-disk performance and provides better control over how much data you’re pushing over the network, but the mismatch slowed down transfer speeds in Vista RTM." Vista SP1 addresses these problems.

Vista SP1 is still an RC, even though it should be available to the public in a couple of weeks.  If you get a chance to pull it down, be careful, as with any non-production level code.