Lately I’ve noticed that my Windows XP file sharing speeds have took a dump.

You know lots of people have a prejudice against wireless internet connections. That if you are using a wireless internet connection and it is downloading slow it is because it is wireless. BS! My wireless internet connection is able suck dry all of the bandwidth that my ISP gives me. Yet, my LAN transfer speeds were well below the transfer speeds that I’m capable of getting when downloading normally from the internetz.

When playing large video files over the wireless network, it would always stutter. I tried various things to help improve it. I switched my media player from Media Player Classic to Windows Media Player, since Windows Media Player has some advanced networking options. What I noticed was that Media Player Classic stutters a lot more than Windows Media Player when playing files across the network. Yea, I love MPC just as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t have any network buffering options. Yet, even with those options turned on in Windows Media Player I was still getting pausing and stuttering, but not as much as I was with MPC.

So in order to test the speeds of the file transfers across the LAN I setup an FTP server on one computer and then started downloading from my other computer. What I noticed was that at first I was consistently getting 100KBps. So I went in the router and changed some options, and sure enough D-Link’s Firewall SPI feature slowed down LAN file transfers. With SPI turned off I got 500-600KBps. I then turned it back on to see if SPI was indeed the reason for the transfer and when I turned it back on I got 200KBps. So I have reason to believe that the SPI option in the D-Link router slowed down file transfers in Windows and I have my suspicions that it not only slowed it down, but over a period of time of high usage that it actually degraded the transfer speed.

I was one of the early adopters of Vista. I bought it only several days after it was released to the public and have been using it ever since. That’s 1 year and 5 months. Myself, being a hardcore Microsoft fan, have been denying all the Vista skeptics. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Vista completely nor do I advocate switching to a Mac. I’m a developer and a Mac is not an option unless I want to target only 5% of the world’s computer-using population most of which probably live in the United States.

I waited for Vista SP1. It took forever. After installing Service Pack 1, my Vista system felt a little bit more trimmed and polished, but it still felt like Vista. And that’s my problem, I don’t like how Vista feels, even after one and half years of using it. Maybe it is just me, but I use my computer tons. And when you use your system on a daily basis you get a perceived “feel” from it. It is in the way it responds, how it performs, and what it looks like. The feeling I get from Vista is heavy and weighted. When I goto work where I have an XP machine, it feels light and lifted even though it has older hardware than my Vista machine at home. And it isn’t about having to spend more money on hardware to run Vista. I don’t care about that. In fact, I upgrade my computer hardware more than anybody I know. At least every 6 months. People I work with will only upgrade if a new game comes out that requires it, but I upgrade just for the hell of it. You learn new things every time.

When Vista came out I heard about all these new networking improvements and such. I’ve tested the network performance on Vista and the perceived difference is not much. I used to do all my torrenting on my Vista machine. It requires a lot of network activity as well as occasionally transferring huge files across the network. What I actually came to realize is that doing BitTorrent on your development machine is a bad idea because the uptime just isn’t there sometimes.

As for the graphics enhancements to Vista such as Direct-X 10… I haven’t found a Direct-X 10 exclusive game that I’ve wanted to play. In other words, there is nothing to force me to upgrade to a DX10 operating system. For any game publisher to develop a game that doesn’t support Direct-X 9 is just throwing money away. Maybe in 5-10 years, but not now. I don’t notice any perceived difference between running a game in DX9 verses running it in DX10. There have been several websites (1, ..) that have taken screenshots of games in DX9 and then in DX10. The difference is minimal. Sure it might have all these under-the-hood enhancements, but I don’t care about them. If my game is running slow I’ll upgrade my graphics card.

Many people who have used Vista complain about UAC this and that. It doesn’t bother me because I just turn it off and leave it off. The new Aero interface for Vista is nice, but it loses its appeal after time. I ended up turning Aero off several months in and switching back to the classic user interface style. The classic interface, for me, improves the “feel” of Vista, but it doesn’t compare to the solidity of XP. Also some of the changes made to the shell make Vista feel sluggish. They just need a shell overhaul. It’s about time.

The search and indexing functionality in Vista is better than XP. But even in Vista, the search dialog seems convoluted. It doesn’t remember any of your settings. Why do I always have to click on Advanced? Or why doesn’t it remember the folder I last searched in? Why do they even give you the option of searching ONLY indexed locations and why is that the default location? Dumb.

As for the ultimateness of the Ultimate edition of Vista, it just isn’t there. The ultimate extras will probably never materialize and even if they do they probably won’t be as ultimate as they were hipped up to be. They’d be some tool or feature that I would never find myself using in the first place. Sure I use some of the more advanced features that Ultimate has to provide, but a lot of them can be found in the cheaper Business editions of Vista. Sure Ultimate doesn’t have Media Center. Besides, I watch most of my media on my computer so their really isn’t much of an advantage for me to use Media Center to do so. And if I need to watch the media on my television I just use my X-Box that has access to my Windows shared folders.

After having switched back to XP, I’ve noticed boot times are a lot faster. Vista would take forever to bootup and it was a pain. I know in the press releases they said they have done a lot to speed up the boot time, but for me it wasn’t as speedy as when I boot into XP. Also one of the things I hated about Vista was the Windows Picture Viewer. The reason I didn’t like the changes they made to it is because they make all the photos you view look darker. They added some kind of shadowy filter on each image therefore distorting its true brightness. When you load that same image into Photoshop it looks how it is suppose with the correct color profile.

It is possible that the perceived feeling I have when working in XP, I will only find in XP, but I can hope. Many people say that Vista is the NT version of ME. I would have to agree. Vista just lends itself to the same perception. The reason why I have stayed for Vista for so long is that starting from scratch again takes time. Now that I am in the position to start over, I will start a new with XP. I await the next version of Windows with much anticipation but I hope that this time around it will live up to my expectations. Vista might be good enough for you, but it isn’t good enough for me.