Just when i thought Vista runs near to perfect with 2Gigs of memory under the hood, news comes in that there could be performance degradation when using the network interface and playing music at the same time. After a series of tests we have observed that the network throughput reduces by around 10% when the sound card is doing its business.

When ZDNet asked Microsoft, they responded with this
- “Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design.”
- “The connection between media playback and networking is not immediately obvious. But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback. Users generally hate this, hence the trade off.”

It so happens that we will have to live with this trade off for downstream traffic. Guess its time to add a few fine text clauses to the definition of multitasking.

In other news, the wait for Vista SP1 is coming to an end soon. What’s in store, is still subject to lots of speculation, but the general word is that Vista SP1 will bring various fixes. This gets me wondering whether there really is a need for coming out with a service pack when Windows Update woks just as well, unless there are a significant number of users who are queuing up to get all the fixes in one shipment.

[ Source: ZDNet ]

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