Actually I support several thousand PCs and a few hundred servers so I did actually do the tests personally. I actually work directly with several MVPs for MS who also have confirmed my findings and admit they don't use Vista on their home PCs as it slows them down. I compared network copies up and down from Windows 2003 x64 and 32 servers, I compared file copies between hard drives on the same machines - I did all the tests with P4 HT and Core 2 PCs identical equipment all updated to the latest drivers - with AV turned off and all machines had 2 gigs of RAM and no other processes turned on.
We don't roll out anything without testing it. I can also point to many well respected journals and magazines with essentially identical findings - Vista on ANY hardware runs slower in file copy performance, than XP on the same equipment. In addition, most machines run apps faster and certainly run games faster on XP than Vista.
Why would you make such foolish statements when there is no supporting information for your claims?
As for complaining to MS - I did during the beta testing of Vista - they thought it was a firewall or AV issue - when I confirmed I had also tested with those turned off they thought it was a driver issue - I couldn't argue with that since I didn't write the drivers. However 5 months later MS did admit Vista is indeed slower. Most educated experts believe there are several reasons why Vista is so slow -
1. DRM - file copies running XP within Vista signficantly outperforms file copies with Vista not using XP in a virtual session on the same machine.
2. Poor network layer access TOE and other features not implemented correctly.
3. Inneficient access to certain hardware layers in the graphical environment.
4. Speghetti code in the indexing features of Vista cause drain on hard drive access as well as memory and processor utilization.
While Vista may be OK for people in their own little world who don't need to copy large files, groups of files or do anything but browse the web, people in networked environments, those working with large files such as multimedia files will find Vista is a significant step backwards for them in performance. And educated users buying state of the art home equipment wouldn't want to slow down that cutting edge technology with a performance killer like Vista. Mind you I support Vista, Windows XP, 2000, 98, Novell and various forms of Linux in addtion to OSX. There are many advantages to Windows, Linux and OSX however Vista presents no real advantages to most users other than a "pretty" interface. For anyone serious about computing performance far outweighs the advantages of a "pretty" interface. Vista is no more secure than XP is. I don't think OSX or Linux is really more secure but there are more known hacks for XP only because it is the most popular - you don't see taggers putting their graffiti on the darkest interior part of a bridge - they want it to be seen - just like hackers so they spend more time going after the most visible platform.
