Windows Vista Performance

We are surprisingly only 6 months away from seeing the next operating system from Microsoft being released, Windows Vista. While the beta testing has finally reached Beta 2 phase, there is still a heck of a lot of work to do on it, but they still promise we'll have our hands on it before the end of the year in final form, while the public will have to wait until early next year before they can go out and buy it. Windows Vista will be the real first hard attempt at pushing people towards a proper 64-bit Operating System, yes we have already have Windows XP X64 Edition, but this hasn't been supported enough by hardware companies to make it into the mainstream and Vista will have a much wider range of 64-bit drivers when it finally gets released.

We have had our hands on Windows Vista Beta 2 for over a week now and have installed it on our review system here at ActiveWin, the results have been good thanks to the great support both AMD and NVidia/Asus and ATI have provided with driver support to us. The installation itself went smoothly, with only a few drivers not supported at first boot, but the install of beta Nvidia chipset drivers and ATI beta graphic drivers went some way to relieve any problems. Once running Windows Vista it was noticeable how much smoother beta 2 ran compared to the 4000+ processor I was running it on before, this is due in part to the dual core processor and the addition of a much improved motherboard and graphics card.

One major enhancement in Windows Vista 64-bit edition is that they provide much improved security features over the plain 32-bit versions. thanks to the No Execute (NX) technology and Data Execution Protection (DEP) which help to try and prevent buffer overflows that are the most common used attacks around today.  So all in all everything looks very promising for Windows Vista performance on the latest AMD based processors, personally I can't wait for the new operating system to come out.