Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow

Is Vista really that bad or do we have rose tinted glasses - How well was Windows XP accepted in the early years

David Overton's Blog — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:16:16 GMT

I have had a bit of a rant with Vlad over at Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3 Performance Stats: Flawed Samples or

re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow

John Currie — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 14:11:30 GMT

Alistair is my line mananger here at GWA.

This issue affected three machines here which were all running Intel Sata chipsets using a hardware raid container.

Vista was absolutely awful until we discovered this.

To give more of an insight into it we used the new vista built in tools to track the issue down, the new "Performance Information & Tools" section in control panel was a massive help and I think its a massive leap forward in monitoring from XP.

After downloading the latest intel sata drivers, boot times went from 20-30 mins to 2-3 mins and the general speed within Vista after boot was remarkably improved. That kind of boot time was making the whole experience a bit naff until we fixed it, now I'm happy.

It's worth noting that we was checking the Dell site for updates for the 9100 and still to date no sata drivers have been released. The intel site provided the drivers after using the chipset id utility.

Cheers,

John

re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow

David Overton — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:27:08 GMT

Jeremy,

I agree with you wholeheartedly on all accounts. I think the changes to Backup are good, but power users need more options. I think the changes to defrag are probably not final and I would expect to see changes in a future product to more meet your requirement (although millions of home users are now happier). Having said that - not everything on your PC should come in the OS or from MS. Diskkeeper is an excellent product.

Thanks for the positive things said about Vista though.

ttfn

David

re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow

Jeremy Norton — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:17:23 GMT

I feel some of the bad rep Vista has been receiving is undeserved. A lot of it has to do with immature 3rd party drivers and software. Some more of it is due to users trying to run Vista on dog-slow hardware and then complaining about the poor speed.

We have Vista business at my workplace, and although my familiarity with it is nowhere close to XP, it has been exceptionally stable over the past 2 months. With decently powerful hardware, vista runs very well.

That said, not everything about Vista is great. Some of the changes drive me up the wall. A good example is the Vista disk defragmenter- so dumbed down that it is ridiculous! Our IT guys have put Diskeeper Pro on all the desktops and it works great. No more having to guess what the defragger is doing, and no more slow-as-molasses defragging. Diskeeper runs fast, and tell me exactly what it is doing. Excellent number of options too...something the vista defragger simply lacks.

re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow

Tim Long — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:47:14 GMT

My experience bears this out. I recently supplied new Office Ready PCs to a customer. My system builder supplied Vista and Office pre-loaded. But the PCs were slower than I expected. The Vista Performance Rating was reported as 1.0, which is amazingly poor for brand new Core2 Duo machines. After a bit of digging around for updated drivers and flashing the BIOS, I got the rating up to 5.2 - what a difference!

The Wow only starts after you get the drivers right!