[Sanddancer]

They got audio setups right. The reason the network degradation happened is that video and audio playback were given realtime priority so background processes couldn't cause pops, stutters, etc. At the time Vista was released, most home users didn't have a gigabit network, so the performance degradation would only happen on a small number of users, and most would rather prefer good audio and video performance to a slowdown in network performance in a small percentage of users. With today's massively multicore systems, it's even less of an issue, while linux still has a problem with latency on applications like pro audio.

[makomk]

The reason the network degradation happened is that Microsoft couldn't figure out how to stop heavy network activity causing audio glitches on some systems even after giving audio realtime priority, so they hacked around it by adding a fixed 10,000 packets-per-second cap on network activity regardless of system speed or CPU usage (less if you had multiple network adapters). See https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2007/08/... This was just as much of an issue on multicore systems because the cap was unaffected by the system speed and chosen based on a slow single-core machine.