Picasa on Windows Vista

Michael Herf, the Picasa engineering manager, writes on his blog that running Picasa on Windows Vista is now almost as fast as on Windows XP, thanks to some performance work that Microsoft have been applying to the latest builds of Vista.

"Some of you know that I've been really worried about the performance we've been seeing of Picasa on Vista. Until now, blttest and ScrollWindow have been 5-10x slower on Vista when compared to XP.

I'm happy to say that Microsoft has turned this around in the latest builds of Vista, and you don't have to write your app in WPF or D3d to get good performance. Legacy GDI apps finally perform well too.

In build 5536 I'm seeing bitblt performance that's within shouting distance of XP, and so even our fullscreen screensavers are performing pretty nicely."

Blttest is a program Michael wrote many years ago to test Windows graphics performance. Vista build 5536 was released to testers a few days ago, and is labeled as "pre-RC1".

Other reports confirm that Vista 5536 has much better performance than earlier Vista releases.

As well as performance issues, running Picasa on Vista also brings with it issues about the down playing of admin accounts - which Michael has been looking into.