The game's up for Vista

I got an interesting invite last night to the media launch of a dedicated gaming centre housed in an HMV store in central London. Resplendent with around 80 Quad core PCs and Dual Core notebooks, Gamebase is every school-boy's dream, and actually most fully-grown-should-have-better-things-to-do-with-their-time-big-boys dream too. With a little help from some beer and sandwiches, the event was basically a chance for some IT hacks to take their professional enmity out on each other courtesy of the latest shoot-fest Call of Duty 4. Networking company D-Link bank-rolled the evening as they provided all the switches and routers that makes the whole virtual war-mongering experience possible.

The other vendors involved in Gamebase are Dell, which provided the high-spec XPS PCs, and Microsoft which provided the high spec operating system for the machines. Now given the Vista branding on all the XPS machines we assumed that the OS in question was Vista – after all a state of the art facility such as Gamebase surely deserves Microsoft's latest operating system? But closer investigation revealed that the OS on the machines we were playing tuned out to be not Vista at all but XP Pro. It seems that Vista had just not performed as well as good old reliable XP – but for some reason, no one was motivated to remove the Vista branding from the Gamebase centre or the machines themselves. Funny that - guess those darn stickers must be just too hard to remove...