Now look - I’m no MSFT basher, but…
Jan 28 2008It just occurred to me what using my now-several-months-old laptop reminds me of.
It’s a reasonably beefed-out Thinkpad, with plenty of memory, and (ahem) it came preloaded with Microsoft Vista. I stifled my instinct to reload it on day one, thinking that the naysayers on Vista were simply disgruntled… well, disgruntled “whatever-you-have-to-be-disgruntled-about to be overly harsh about Vista.” Wrong-o, to my chagrin.
The performance of my machine honestly reminds me of the days of Windows 3.1, with (in terms of sheer performance relative to reasonably expectations) Windows 3.1 coming out the clear winner.
Windows Vista is an unspeakably bad operating system implementation, and compares so unfavorably to each of the last three generations of Microsoft desktop operating systems that I cannot think of any non-profane way to describe it. Yet, here I am trying to avoid potty-mouthing my own blog. So it’s a conundrum.
It will take me days of effort to reload my machine and reliably assure myself that I got everything restored, but my disgust with the worthless alleged advances of Vista has finally overcome my desire to avoid computer busywork. I’m reverting to XP, knowing that the speed I gain in doing so should recoup me the time lost in reversion. I project a payback of two weeks or less. Yes, Vista is that badly done.
I repeat - I’m no Microsoft basher, and I’ve been a satisfied user of their desktop operating systems for 20+ years. But Vista has no upside to cancel out its hideous performance downside, and is an abortion best avoided.
Addendum - 3/3/2008: I’m presently half-way done replacing Vista with XP Pro. My disdain for it is such that I look forward to never using Vista again. Luckily for me, my disdain hasn’t reached critical levels, as it has for some people.
AHHAAAH! Believe it or not I’ve been wanting to ask someone who knows about such things for a few months. I noticed a while ago that when I restarted in safe mode (a simulacrum of Win 95 or somesuch, not bells-and-whistles Vista anyway), pursuant to a big blue screen of death crash (creepily overfrequent, now), my machine ran like a fucking dream. Really fast, properly fast. And so I began to wonder, maybe my new HP’s mysterious performance issues aren’t anything of the sort, maybe Vista just sucks. I find your confirmation of this possibility, like most of what I know you ever to have said, intriguing, and perhaps when a couple more months of blithe passivity have gone by, I will revert. Gotta find the disk somewhere…..
Seriously, I’ve been stifling this urge for some time, thinking that it will eventually get better. And it never does - at odd times of the day or night, the machine just stops responding to me, all running applications lock up, and I’m forced to wait until they unlock before moving forward.
It’s a memory hog, which isn’t a big deal - most anyone can double the memory in their computer (as I’ve already done here). The problem is that it’s got inherent flaws that memory won’t fix. The memory footprint is literally twice that of XP, and the performance appears to be half that of XP.
When I really need to get something done in a hurry, I could borrow my old Thinkpad (half the memory, only single processor, lower clock speed, but running XP) from my daughter and be miles ahead.
Vista’s flatly a piece of crap, in other words. I’ll never buy another machine with Vista installed, and if I’m ever asked (by someone that I don’t hate) whether they should install Vista, I’ll answer with an definitive No!