I've been running Vista for a couple of days now, and overall I'm impressed with how the operating system has come along. I have however noticed that the performance of this release lags far behind XP SP2. I realise that this is a Beta 2 release, but I find some of the issues to be perplexing given the fact that the operating system is based off of the Server 2003 code base.

For example, loading a burnt data DVD into the optical drive and attempting to navigate through the DVD is painfull. It takes roughly 10 seconds to load up a directory listing. Now I realize that this could all be attributed to driver problems what with the system being in Beta and all, and my system specifications (listed below) could also be a contributing factor.

I've done a rough search for blog postings or something from someone within Microsoft of a substantive position to comment on the performance levels of Vista Beta 2, but have come up with nothing. This could very well have already been discussed here, as I'm late to the party, but I haven't been able to find anything here either.

So basically, once you get down to it, I'd like to know what Microsoft has said that we should expect when it comes to performance from Vista Beta 2, and what kind of performance we should expect from Vista RC1.

System Specifications:
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1GB PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 XT All In Wonder
BenQ DVD Drive