Saturday, July 26, 2008

I just can't take it anymore



Vista.
  • It's a power pig. Green? I know I'm seeing red! I used to get up to 8 hours on battery life with XP and now maybe 2 hours with Vista?
  • What's with the interface dimming and then going back to normal brightness? Is it telling me there's something going on with security? Whatever it is I don't like it and I don't understand why it is doing it.
  • As my dear old mother would say: "It's slower than molasses in January". Runs on 2Gb? How about walks on 2Gb!
I've backed up my machine - twice - and am about to reformat and go back to XP.

IE7.
  • I'm so sick and tired of the inability for this thing to remember web site passwords because "I" don't have the cookies set correctly. This typically happens with all my Google properties - coincidence?
  • I'm so sick and tired of "The current web site is trying to open a site in your Trusted Sites list. Do you want to allow this?" dialog box. If I had a penny for each of these I'd be retired.
  • I'm so sick and tired of the general clumsiness.
I have no idea if I can get rid of IE but I've fallen in love with Firefox3. "Do you wish to restore to your previous state?" - Are you kidding me? Restore to the previous state, with all my tabs intact? Can you love a piece of software?

About 18 months ago when I had another one of these liminal moments with Microsoft I sold half my Microsoft stock and bought Apple. That certainly wasn't a mistake because Apple has only gone up about 70% or so (I bought at $95) and Microsoft is the same or down today as it was then.

I'm getting ready to dump the rest of my Microsoft stock. Probably on their next up-tick - whenever that might be.

Dear Readers, this will be my last post from Vista.


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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve,

Call me crazy, but this seems a bit dramatic.

I've been running Vista since early beta on various levels of hardware, and while the experience on each can be different, it's by no means abysmal.

Running on a Dell C640 Latitude from circa 2002/3 with 1gig of ram, it was more than fine. Even doing basic video editing no less! Though when one memory socket died, and all it would recognize was 512mb, it did slow to a crawl with all the disk paging to a slooow disk.

I would say the "Sweet spot" in 2008 has been 4gig of ram on Vista64 with a basic multicore processor (you know, the kind of system that goes for $500-700 in retails stores).

No matter what the sales hype, others recommendations, it all depends on how you use the system. If it's slow for YOU, change the hardware. But I don't think going back to an older version is really the move that will yield you the best productivity. I personally cringe at using XP on other machines.

Also check out ie7pro.com. FF3 is "nice" and while I have it installed, I can't remember the last time I fired it up. While it has alot of capabilities, it just felt like it was trying to be all things, and I ended up not using much of the add-ins, etc.

Also the power profiles by default suck, so I would seriously do some reading for optimizing for YOUR work habits. I'm on a Dell M6300 (17inch, dual core extreme,) and even if I forget to switch the profile from "performance" to "battery save" I get more than 2 hours with running VMs on the thing.

The screen dimming is a "security feature" believe it or not. It does suck if you don't have a good graphics card (or the wrong driver).

Oh well, everyone has different experiences....

Unknown said...

I don't know what to say other than my experience was crap. I had updated drivers but still no joy.

On my next hardware refresh I'll try it again. In the meantime...

Jackson

Unknown said...

Jackson,

Aside from professional requirements, what's wrong with trying a Mac?

It's not perfect, but it's a lot more hassle-free than Vista. And a lot more shaken-down as well.

(Don't worry, I won't recommend Linux, even though that's where my professional life is. It's getting closer to ready for Prime Time, but ain't there yet, unless you're a Linux-savvy techie. In which case, it can rock.)

Either way, sorry to hear about the troubles. And great to read your blog.

Rock on,

Doc

Unknown said...

Doc - Wow! Great to hear from you! Frankly, next hardware refresh for me at Quest and I am going to seriously consider your suggestion.

I'm actually looking forward to a prime time Linux. Will it be Ubuntu? Who will get there first?

Cheers,

Jackson

Unknown said...

Good luck with the equipment refresh. If you get a MacBook Pro with a 250Gb drive, you can run Windows on it under dual boot or Parallels. I haven't set it up yet, but from all I've seen it works pretty well. And it's remarkably crash-free. This one is about 4 months old and I've had only one system crash, with no other problems. I've had two others in the same series and both are still working fine.

As for Linux, Ubuntu looks like the winner right now. See here.

Billy Bosworth said...

Jackson, this was similar to the experience I had when I bought my wife a new HP laptop with Vista for Christmas. I so disappointed with it (and the inevitable finger pointing between the hardware and software folks) that I took the plunge and bought an iMac when it came time for me to buy a new home computer. Is it perfect? No. In fact, it has way more warts than most folks talk about. But, one GLOWING, and I mean GLOWING, feature is the operating system. This sucker is rock solid, fast, amazingly efficient at multitasking, and handles large file work (i.e. my videos I make for the kids) way better than I hoped for.

As far as IE goes, I gave up on it a long time ago and have become a Flock (built on FireFox) zealot. I love it.

BTW, I posted about my mac experiences a few times over on my blog and when I do, responses in my inbox and comments are never lacking. ;-)