In my blog post a year back ( http://kvrlogs.blogspot.com/2008/04/rendezvous-with-vista.html ) I had given a favourable review of Vista. Now i take everything back that I said.
Earlier I thought my Dell 620 ( had a Vista performance rating of 3.0 ) was not man enough to run Vista – so I was forgiving. But now I have a Dell Studio 17 which has a performance rating of 5.0 – and it is still troubling me. Here are the reasons :
1. I have an apple USB keyboard with the mouse attached to it. Every time the machine comes out of sleep I have to wait 1 minute before it gets activated. And yes the year is 2009 and it takes such a long time for Vista to detect a USB device/hub. Good job.
2. BSODs – I see it 2 to 3 times a week. I still have not found a pattern and I do not have any freebies off the net.
3. I am in Bangalore and power goes off frequently. And along with it my internet connection goes off. Mostly I will be connected to Apartment Adda through putty and it will stop responding. The CPU usage will shoot up to 100%. It took a long time before I found this problem. I started suspecting that my machine got infected and ran scan after scan.
How did the kernel overlords allow any process to consume 100% CPU – that too a lowly SSH client called putty which is 300KB in size.
4. Search and Indexing is a joke. Microsoft is trying to compete with Google? Good luck.
5. Finally, booting speed. It is as slow as Windows 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, Windows XP. Nothing has changed. I have to start the laptop, go brush teeth, read newspaper and drink coffee, wash the cup, read A to Z to my son, and then when I come back it might be ready – or it might have installed updates and restarting.
Oh so you recommend trying windows 2007? And I have to pay for it. Naah – I think I have had enough with Windows OSes the past decade.
Now I have Ubuntu on the other partition and it blazes – takes full advantage of the hardware that is offerred to it. I am going to format this machine with just Ubuntu in another couple of weeks. Wish chrome is ready for linux soon.
Ubuntu! Dude, noooooo! Am I the lone warrior here?? 😛
Btw, I’ve never seen BSOD on “my” Vista, but I’ve seen some on Macs running Vista.
i heard you can downgrade vista to xp if you have the original version. …If im not wrong.
Yep that is doable, but I do not have an XP CD. While buying the new laptop I asked XP to be installed but they will not budge. Dell elsewhere lets you choose XP or even choose linux and they reduce the sticker price – not in India.