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Q:
What's the deal between Windows XP and Vista? 
Where do they stand in comparison to each other these days? 
Is one really better than the other? Any information you 
have would be great! 

A:
It's interesting that you ask this, because just last week, 
I came across an article online that talked all about this. 
I figured a lot of you would be interested in hearing about 
it, so when I saw this question in my e-mail, I had to run 
it right away. I hope this will give you a good idea of 
what's been going on between Windows XP and Windows Vista in 
the last few months. Let's check it out! 
To begin, basically what I found was some new tests were done 
on both XP and Vista and they revealed that XP, along with 
its new Service Pack 3 (beta version), has twice the performance ratings of Vista. And that's even with Vista's beta Service Pack
1 as well. That's pretty intense, isn't it?! Now, the full version
of Vista's SP1 is supposed to be released early next year (2008),
but the beta version was still tested and it didn't really do 
much to outshine its predecessor.

So, what exactly did the tests find? Well, for one, Vista, 
with and without its SP1, performed much slower than Windows XP.
It took the Vista operating system 80 seconds to complete the
test, while it only took XP 35. Like I said before, Vista was
tested both with and without the Service Pack and that brought 
up some interesting results as well. With the SP1, Vista's
performance increased less than two percent and that was rated
next to XP's improvement of 10 percent with its SP3. Wow! 
Unfortunately, if the Vista SP1 does not improve significantly,
that could lead to another huge setback for the Vista operating
system. Several businesses and individuals are waiting for the 
SP1 to be released before they make the switch over to Vista. 
As of right now, only 13 percent of businesses have already 
started using Vista and it doesn't look like that number will
change much, unless the SP1 makes some big changes. According 
to Microsoft, the service packs are "still in development" though,
so hopefully that will help Vista in the long run. "It has always
been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum
of customer needs," a Microsoft spokesperson said. Let's hope 
they do! 
The article also went over how Microsoft feels about the initial
release of Vista, which occurred almost one year ago. According 
to Microsoft's corporate vice president Mike Sievert, the launch
of Vista did not go as well as they thought it would. "Frankly,
the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista." And that
may be true, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft really did enough
to inform the users about the new features and benefits of Vista.
Windows Vista comes with a lot of complex features and Microsoft
didn't really educate the world about them. NPD analyst Chris
Swenson said that Microsoft should have done some more advertising
for Vista when it first came out through TV, radio and print ads.
The amount of advertising done for Vista rated poorly against what
was done for Windows XP. 
Maybe we're all just used to XP, but the sales show it's much more
popular than Vista as well. During the first six months of retail
sales, Vista fell 59.7 percent below what XP sold when it was
first released. That's a huge difference! PC manufacturers are 
also still selling XP computers, because the demand for them is 
so high. Microsoft set a deadline of January 31, 2008 for all XP
sales to end, but they have been forced to extend that until June
2008, because they are still very popular among users. According
to Microsoft, 88 million copies of Vista have been sold, but that
still doesn't stack up to the numbers XP has brought in.
So, as you can see, Windows Vista is having a hard time getting 
past the craze of Windows XP, but hopefully with some additional
updates and changes, it will be a top notch operating system one
day as well. We can only hope!