I got a new HP laptop with Vista Business pre-installed as an evaluation
machine. 1 Gig RAM, Core 2 Duo, 2.1 GHz or so.
It's horrible. I just can't understand why a machine that should be peppy
is running like a dog.
One mistake I made was running it it 64-bit mode. For the most part it
works, but some of my favorite programs flake out under 64 bit. I'm
considering re-loading under 32-bit for functionality reasons. What really
gripes me about Microsoft is there is no way to swtich between 32 and 64 bit
modes without a complete rebuild of the system.
Turning off the Aero-glass seemed to help a little bit. Turning off all the
other eye candy does make it seem more snappy, but it also makes the machine
look more ancient.
And forget that new security feature where it keeps asking you do you want
to do this. That gets incredibly annoying. I turned it off, but I haven't
used it much since. I'm thinking that may be giving me a false perception
that the machine is slow. It blanks the screen, then pops up the dialog
window, then blanks the screen again before going back to what you were
doing. I think that screen blanking may be causing the laptop's monitor to
re-synchronize, making everthing run like a turtle on allergy medication
In short, I'm not impressed with Vista. I see nothing compelling that makes
me want to use it (other than it looks pretty). I'm resisting the urge to
downgrade that laptop to XP, hoping that things eventually improve after a
few patches.
Nightmares? I totally blizted a Vista machine when I tried to have it join
a domain. Something really got fouled up with the security identifiers and
it became unusable. I tried rebuilding it, but then it refused to power on
for more than a few seconds. That's likely a hardware issue, though. I
sent that one back to HP for analysis.
I think I'm going to wait for Mac's Leopard for my next personal machine.
George
