What a difference Vista doesn't make

I barely ever use Windows. For the most part, everything runs on my mac or I've written programs to do what I need so I don't have to use Windows. There are a couple exceptions -- the first is Office 2007's Equation editor that we had to use for my SEM and MLM classes. I know LaTeX, so I could easily have made the equations in pristine 600dpi quality, but in order to make them embedded in Word documents and editable, I had to use Word 2007. The other exception is SAS -- funny enough SAS runs on Linux and UNIX (like BSD and RedHat), but I can't find anyone at the company who will sell me a copy of the Linux version. That's right, money in hand waiting for someone to take it and no one is really interested! What's the world come to? Maybe that's why the economy is in trouble.

Anyway, for those _two_ cases, I run Windows on a virtual machine on my laptop in VMWare. I used to run Vista because it was only $14 at the campus store and I figured I could save myself the time of the 2 service packs and other 190+ updates that have to be installed. I was genuinely not impressed by the new OS. It felt sluggish, and the eye-candy didn't really help. I certainly wasn't any more productive due to the eye candy and as I just discovered - it's a lot slower. See, I thought for a while that Vista was slow because of my virtual machine. My virtual machine weighed in at just over 20GB with Vista, SAS, and Office 2007 installed. Well today I have more insight into the issue. I trashed my Vista install and put XP with all of the Service Packs (even SP3) on, installed SAS and Office 2007. The result, my virtual machine is now 8GB. That's right, less than half as large as the Vista install. And the more surprising feature - my entire computer doesn't grind to a very slow crawl when I'm running Windows. Right now I have SAS and Word 2007 open in Windows. On the mac side, I have iTunes, iChat, Safari, and Mail open. To see what kind of performance penalty I was taking, I briefly opened MATLAB and to my surprise, it opened and ran at a fairly decent speed, despite one of my processors being used for Windows and 1 of my 2 GB of RAM being used for Windows. So in conclusion, Vista really does suck up a lot of hard drive space and a lot more processor than XP. Why would anyone upgrade? I guess it's sort of telling that Microsoft is being forced to continue selling XP even though Vista is out. Mass demand for an older product is something you don't hear very often - it's like people demanding a 2001 car instead of the 2008 car.