Kinda old news by now that Vista doesn't let you listen to music without cutting your network performace from 100% down to 10 or 15%. Instead of of 1 mb/s download, you'll get 0.1 mb/s. Quite significant.

This is a serious, serious design problem. We can safely assume that all users make heavy use of their internet connection, and many (most?) play music through their computer (mp3, etc.). So for sake of argument, let's just say "this problem affects everyone".

The new bit is a response from Microsoft about why Vista can only do audio or networking, but not both ( » Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue).

Here's my favorite part:

"In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design"

What in the hell? Even old computers (running old versions of Windows) are capable of multimedia playback + normal network performance.

This is like saying, "if you drive your car above a certain speed limit, your radio won't work, so if you have the stereo on we'll just limit how fast your car drives to 20mph and your music will play normally."

Seriously, it's that absurd.

I'm a software developer and I'm fully aware that there are often trade-offs we must make between performance and usability. But remember, this will affect everyone so knowingly proceeding with a car that forces music listeners to drive 20mph makes no sense. Microsoft's claims that this only affects lan performance or downstream transmit only are irrelevant; it's still really bad.

Did they deliberately cripple it?