DosDaddy wrote:In vista these features were stillborn at best, and only solidified more or less adequately in Win7.
Because?
DosDaddy wrote: This added to the helpless amount of bloatware services (that couldn't be disabled without significant loss of functionality), made Vista so sluggish and unstable it was almost as useless as XP before SP1.
So there were some bugs in SP0, that was already covered (as if there weren't in other versions of Windows, or other OSes altogether). Vista today has these fixes, your argument is invalid.
DosDaddy wrote:XP wasn't designed for that type of hardware so it's not a fair comparison
Lolwut? Do you have any idea where Windows NT comes from? It has supported multi-CPU and multi-core systems since its inception in the early 90s.
XP was certainly designed for that type of hardware. The technology just wasn't as advanced yet as it is in later versions of Windows.
In fact, Windows XP was the first OS to have specific optimizations for HyperThreading (supporting up to 32 logical cores).
DosDaddy wrote:but even then, there's this nice little thing called "affinity" wherewith you may launch any application and balance out the load to your liking.
Again, lolwut?
Did you even try to read the above links, about IO prioritizing and such? Because if you did, and you understood even just a small percentage, you'd know that thread affinity doesn't help you there in the least.
Aside from that, thread affinity is little more than a hack for when the software and/or the OS doesn't know which cores to use, or how many.
It's not something I want to have to rely on to get a decent user experience in everyday use.
DosDaddy wrote:All in all, XP belongs to the high-end, single-core CPU era, and at that you still can't beat it. Vista...just plain abominable.
Again, your argument is invalid.