What a POS.

The entire industry should be fired. Complete rubbish. Why do we need bloatware and huge power sucking boxes that double as space heaters is beyond me.

It's criminal, and a complete waste. Instead they should be moving to shrink everything, including the OS and its requirements.

This is one user who will not, for a long time, be upgrading to this POS.

God what are you doing! RC1 is out! Why the hell are you doing a review of beta2??!?!?!

Wow Microsoft, another power hungry piece of crap with no real tangible benefits. Since Windows 98, nothing has really changed that much, same GUI, same basic functionality, but a large increase in overhead and of course pricetag...*gasp* WHAT A FUCKING LOAD OF SHIT! YOU MS BASTARDS SHOULD BURN IN HELL YOU CORPORATE EXPLOITERS! CHURNING OUT PURE, UNADULTERATED SHIT! DIE DIE DIE

Long live Linux and open source 4 ever!

RC1 is streets ahead of Beta 2 in terms of performance and drivers... why is this article using Beta 2 when RC1 is available?

What a wasted effort. You release this test after RC1 is released and i just wasted 15 mins reading what is in effect tripe. it was unreasonable to expect meaningful performance from beta code.

By definition Beta code has debug software built in and does not have all features switched on. Performance will be effected and why you would want to do a complete game test is beyond me.
RC1 is out now and as far as performance goes is streets ahead of Beta2.

I agree - RC1 should have been the review OS of choice here. I'm also curious as to how many games you didn't get to work on the platform - so far I've managed to get X3, BF2, Far Cry, FEAR to name a few working not only on RC1 but Beta2 as well - albeit performance was degraded in Beta2. Games such as GRAW still prove incompatible but drivers are still in beta for hardware, and the OS, while now at a stage that it's actually usable on a daily basis still has a lot of fluff in it that should be removed before it gets to RTM. I too would like to see a side-by-side comparison of Beta2 against RC1.

I got news for ya... EVERY version of any MICROSUCKS product is still Beta no matter how much hype they use to sell it to naive consumers.

No one with a clue would touch Vista as all online reviews confirm it is a POS.

Could you perform the same tests on RC1 ?

13 pages of stating the blinking obvious...

Heh, i am really dissapointed with Xbitlabs. After this many great reviews that offerred insight into the future we are getting this piece of crap article? RC1 is out for weeks now (even public is over 10 days old) and you guys are posting Beta2 review? RC1 is light year ahead of beta2 in gaming and overall performance. So just take down this acticle and get the RC1 download going!

wow you guys are a bunch of animals. I'm sure they are aware RC1 is out. Its possible this review was done before RC1 was available and they just decided to post it anyways. And whats with all the childish swearing in all the posts!

My magic 8 balll says they will post an article on RC1 soon enough...

Have some patience u junkies!

Why are you testing Beta 2 when RC1 is out????

Hey, didn't anyone see all the reviews with XP 32 SP2 versus XP 64 in gaming performance? 64-bitness, simply put, hurts 32-bit gaming performance. Running a 32-bit app in "emulation" mode in a 64-bit OS stinks. Or, if the app was patched to 64-bit, the performance was no better and usually worse.

Driver issues aside, did anyone actually expect BF2, FarCry, etc. to be faster under Vista? The best you could hope for is equivalent performance. UNLESS, we re-compile all the 32-bit games to 64-bit Vista versions.

Gentlemen and Ladies, start your wallets!!!

I would have liked to see this done on an RC1 build (b5600) or later as these have been publicly available for weeks now. This beta 2 build is several months old now and from a performance standpoint is in an entirely different ballpark. So much code has been optimized and debugging features removed that the performance seen in RC1 and later bares no resemblance to that of Beta 2 and earlier. Apart from that, I think it was a great basis for an article, and very much look forward to seeing follow-up segments looking at the performance improvements between Beta2 -> RC1 -> future builds -> and WinXP.

Cheers!
-Devon Nekechuk

Incompetent journalism to review an obselete version of Vista.

It's amazing that this was even considered as an option or an article.

The entire tone of the article puts Vista in a very negative light, even though it does mention that it is beta software.

One thing that I didn't see mentioned in this article - particularly where it is relevant in installation and gaming - is that Vista beta 2 had most of its files compiled in debug mode (including the window manager). This meant giant file sizes with debugging info, as well as slow code because of less compiler optimising. Why did Microsoft do this? Because when a bug was found, it enabled people to give them useful information on the problem.

Releasing this article after RC1 has been publically available is a mistake. Yes, people should realise that it is beta 2, and yes, people should realise that beta software doesn’t reflect the final product... But Xbit labs attracts hobbyist users who aren't all software developers or experts. It is this crowd of people who will misinterpret what is being said in this review (mostly thanks to the poor quality of the article and its timing) and join the OMG MICROSOFT IS CRAP crowd.

I have been running vista beta 2 and now RC1 since they day they were available. Beta 2 was buggy, yes, but if you saw the amount of improvement from beta 1 then you would have had faith in the product still. RC1 confirmed my hopes, as it is starting to look like a great operating system. RC1 has much less code compiled in debugging mode, which equates to a huge speedup (even on my old socket A system). The graphics card drivers and other system driver affecting performance have greatly matured to be stable and pretty fast too.

I really hope Xbit labs can make it more obvious that this article is very outdated and should not be taken seriously at all. An RC1 update is needed, but even then the fact that it is still in development and that you are testing DX9 cards on a beta of DX10 should be emphasised.

Very disappointed.

wait, 64-bit vista?
i'd like to see 32-bit vista performance...
and stating blindly obvious like most commentators before me - rc1.

ASUS EN7950GX2 1 GB DDR 3 WITH SLI IS THE BEST SUPORTING PCI EXPRESS CARD FOR WINDOWS VISTA.

Huh?? Why is this coming out now to talk about Beta 2 when RC1 has been out for a couple of weeks? Not sure how anyone could find it usefull or applicable to Vista's current state...

I think Microsoft MUST fix this-if they want their new OS to be MORE popular than Win XP.