The Sports Photo Guy

Perhaps long overdue, today I add Microsoft Windows Vista to The Crap List.

This bloated monstrosity deserves to be on this list for a whole host of reasons, but for this site, I will concentrate on what Microsoft has managed to do for the simple file transfer.  I don’t pretend to know the details, but apparently at the very heart of Vista is code that scans for evidence of rights-managed content, and this process throttles simple file transfers.

Take the winner of our USB UDMA reader tests: the Lexar UDMA Dual Slot USB reader.  One of the faster CF cards, the PNY Optima Pro UDMA, clocked in at 26 MB/sec on our Windows XP test machine.  Under Windows Vista – on a much, much faster base machine – the transfer rate slowed to a crawl of just 10 MB/sec.  Firewire readers don’t fare much better; Lexar’s FireWire 800 UDMA (RW034) reader could reach 23 MB/sec with fast CF cards under Vista – still slower than USB under XP and barely half the potential transfer speed of 40-45 MB/sec under FireWire 800.

And Microsoft thinks Vista should be the operating system of choice for professional photographers?  Puh-lease.  It’s enough to make this longtime PC user want to buy a Mac.