It has been a longer time ago now (over two years ?) and at that time things were "measured" by achievable latency - hence how real-time is that OS really ? As you will know MS systems claim not to be better than 20ms in general which is a total laugh if you look at the 1ms I use from the start (WASAPI) which is a kind of virtual because timer resolution is wacky near 1ms (and "normal" officially can't go lower), but this was before KS. And as you know we can now reach 1/88200 at 32 bits easily which is over 100 times lower than 1ms. So, how real time do we want real time to be ?
But as with W7 (where that numbers are reached), what does it tell ? not much about sound quality ...
Of course, I start about "real time", but that at least always *was* the argument for Linux, including "tweakablility". But next ... this implies more tweaking than low latency or anything. That we know now too. On the other hand, be careful, because at watching closely there aren't all *that* much really working out tweaks for SQ. The most we apply ourselves and is outside OS related stuff (like RAMDisk, copying at the right time, blahblah), and the tweaks that really should work out for SQ ... I don't know.

Even saying that Vista is better for SQ because it was more made for it ... I don't know. What I do know though that it works reliably, and at least I can do what I want, and it behaves how I expect. Not so with W7, and it is exactly there where it goes (and went) wrong. If I say (in the program) I want A to have priority over B, this doesn't work in W7 because it seems to have its own rules. Now *that* is important to me and SQ, because I'm in the blind, as is SQ because of that.

Btw, I don't have the experience on XP here (I never really used it for playing). Not really true, because at fist there was Engine#1 (which was Direct Sound) and already that sounded better to most people than any KS/ASIO from that time. But XP has other nasty things like limited buffer sizes here and there, which went away per Vista.

Peter