I finally took the plunge and did an in place upgrade of XP to Vista Ultimate over the weekend. All in all I must say the upgrade went without a hitch, other than it took hours to do it!

So much has been written about Vista performance, I won’t rehash it here. I’ve tried all the great tricks such as disabling Aero, turning off some of the animations, changing memory settings, etc. The Windowed performance is doing pretty good, got some network tweaking to do and that is my biggest grip.

I’ve tried some network tweaking, but so far it hasn’t fixed my biggest problem. I like to play two particular FPS a few hours a week. Tried playing them after the upgrade and they were almost unplayeable. I started tweaking the graphics thinking that was the culprit, and it mostly was. However, doing some tests, I see that the network performance of the new improved Vista TCP stack sucks. Pure and simple. The machine is 15% slower on the network than it was under XP, albeit, the XP tests is months old. I would almost discredit it, except playing the FPSs before upgrade, I was one of the fastest players around. Currently, I can barely move, and my avatar freezes a lot. If you play games, you know that a target that isn’t moving is easy to hit.

Will keep you up to date.