Microsoft responds to Vista network issue

Found on ZDNet on Saturday, 25 August 2007
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I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft. Here are some points of interest:

"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."

"Two other things to note. First, we have not seen any cases where a users internet performance would be degraded, in our tests this issue only shows up with local network operations."

So basically they admit that Vista sucks at multitasking. Really, if your operating system has do reduce the performance of such basic things as networking to play audio flawlessly, there's something fundamentally wrong.