It’s been about 2 weeks since I switched to Vista full time now at home, and I’m liking it quite a bit so far. Performance seems fine, and the machine seems to operate much smoother than when I ran XP. Suspend and resume is great too, both take just a few seconds, again, much better than XP.
What surprises me more though is how much Outlook 2007 and Desktop search perform better on Vista. I know there are several kernel enhancements that make things like Desktop search run better, but my intuitive feel is that Outlook itself actually runs better.
Which leads me to have the sneaking suspicion that Outlook 2007 (and most of Office 2007) were actually built for Vista. With Vista doing so badly as it did out of the gate, many more people than intended ended up running Office 2k7 on XP. My guess is that because the primary focus was Vista, and that Vista could better “handle” a badly performing application, that the Outlook guys didn’t really see the performance problems until it was too late. In short, the better Vista kernel masked the poor performance of the new Outlook version. But even with the Outlook 2k7 SP1 patches, it still runs significantly better on Vista than XP.
Of course this is all complete and utter speculation. Even on Vista, Outlook still seems overly slow for what it does. There are tons of mail apps that can process way more mail than Outlook can and also be orders of magnitude more responsive (Thunderbird for one). But Outlook 2k7 (with searching) is definitely tolerable on Vista, and we know MS is most often about providing the “good enough” instead of the “good”, so no real surprises.
I suppose we’ll have to wait around to see if Mail.app can do it any better, though I have my doubts there as well. Windows 7 at least seems to be trying to push into the “good” category. Let’s hope the Outlook folks take up the cause as well.