Vista on Laptops

[time]

So, I see that major laptop manufacturers (it's really farcical when they insist on referring to them as "notebooks") provide Vista, Vista or Vista as OS options.

This sounds only bad to me. Does anyone have a survival guide to Vista on laptops - apart from, "Don't do it!"? Can it be as bad as we've been led to expect?

 

[ddrueding]

I'm running Vista Ultimate on my Gateway convertible tablet. It's not the most powerful thing, but works fine. It resumes faster from hibernation than it did on XP.

 

[Tannin]

Nope. It's worse. There is only one thing to do: insist on getting Vista Business as your pre-load and then upgrade to XP Pro. Unlike Vista Home, you can do that with Vista Business. Of course, there are a whole lot of bulls*it rules surrounding it, but they amount to the customer providing the installation media, which must belong to a validly licenced copy of XP, and the customer or his representative (i.e., you) doing the install. At that point you call Microsoft and they provide you with an installation key. Or at least that's the way it's supposed to work, I haven't tried it for myself.

As for running Vista on a laptop, not a chance in hell. I took the opportunity to do some timings the other day. This is from memory, I have the exact figures to the nearest half-second at the office somewhere.

Acer Celeron 1.6, 512MB, 80GB. Perfectly good little machine, brand, spanking new. Untouched factory install, except that I switched a lot of the eye candy off. Not an objectionable amount of crap in the startup, quite good considering it was from one of the major makers. The only real nasty was Norton Anti-virus. I removed that later, as an experiment, and the system improved, but not by much. Around 20 seconds faster on all tests, though I didn't do formal timings of it. I did do exact timings for:

Start-up (power switch to desktop, with hour glass disappeared)
Shut-down (desktop to power off)
Open Control Panel (start, settings, control panel, till the hour glass went away)

Startup:
Vista: 1 minute, 30.5 seconds
XP Home: 40 seconds

Shutdown:
Vista: 1 minute, 20.5 seconds
XP Home: 18 seconds

Open control panel:
Vista: 1 minute 28 seconds
XP Home: 4 seconds

That last figure could be shaved quite a bit. I was using the mouse left-handed and doing the stop-watch timing with my right hand. With a little better hand-eye coordination, I could have got the XP Home control panel down to about 2.5 seconds. But there didn't seem much point.

 

[ddrueding]

Good to see you back, Tannin.

 

[Fushigi]

Initial loads may be slower; I haven't really clocked them. Re-loading, though, when it can pull the contents from cache, Vista flies. Full Outlook 2007 loads sub-second as does Firefox. Even with Areo Glass amped all the way up. I'm speaking of my new desktop and not a notebook, though, since I don't have a Vista notebook around just yet.

With the normally slower spindle speeds of laptop HDs, using ReadyBoost might speed Vista up some.

 

[Handruin]

Wow, what's the deal with the vista control panel? The rest of the times are pretty significant in difference as well. I have a copy of visit which I've obtain pretty cheap (to learn it) but have yet to install it. I have it earmarked for my other desktop machine once I can get it setup.

 

[ddrueding]

Wow, what's the deal with the vista control panel? The rest of the times are pretty significant in difference as well. I have a copy of visit which I've obtain pretty cheap (to learn it) but have yet to install it. I have it earmarked for my other desktop machine once I can get it setup.

I am not able to perform as direct a comparison as he, but his numbers don't seem to jive with my experience. It could be that I've never installed Vista on a machine with 512MB of RAM; I haven't built a machine with less than 1GB in years. And the CPU seems a bit pokey as well. The advice I give is not to try and make Vista run on a machine built for XP, buy a new one from me instead

I have the control panel expand off the start menu and it takes <1 second. This isn't what Tannin was doing and my system is a beast, so it can't be a direct comparison, but that is what I see here.

 

[mubs]

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeees back!

 

[Tannin]

Just passing through, Mubs. Mega, mega busy at present, so my extended Storage Forum holiday will continue a while longer. But nice to talk with you and Dave and all the crew.

Dave, we are talking a brand new laptop (sold by one of the large chain stores, not me, of course) which shipped with Vista. Indeed, you cannot buy a laptop in any of the major brands with any other OS except Vista, and this type of configuration is stock standard normal at the entry level.

You know, real world stuff. Remember the real world? The place with everyday things that real people actually buy, people who drive five year old cars and worry about their mortgages. That's the sort of machine this is. And - now we get to the real point - for the intended tasks, this little machine is absolutely and entirely capable of performing them perfectly well. It is only this obnoxious, overpriced, underperforming, user-hostile disaster called Vista that destroys it.

Err ... I seem to be growing eloquent again, and the hours are flying by. Time I renewed my self-imposed exile for a few more weeks or months till I get caught up.

 

[Tannin]

Just passing through, Mubs. Mega, mega busy at present, so my extended Storage Forum holiday will continue a while longer. But nice to talk with you and Dave and all the crew.

Dave, we are talking a brand new laptop (sold by one of the large chain stores, not me, of course) which shipped with Vista. Indeed, you cannot buy a laptop in any of the major brands with any other OS except Vista, and this type of configuration is stock standard normal at the entry level.

You know, real world stuff. Remember the real world? The place with everyday things that real people actually buy, people who drive five year old cars and worry about their mortgages. That's the sort of machine this is. And - now we get to the real point - for the intended tasks, this little machine is absolutely and entirely capable of performing them perfectly well. It is only this obnoxious, overpriced, underperforming, user-hostile disaster called Vista that destroys it.

Err ... I seem to be growing eloquent again, and the hours are flying by. Time I renewed my self-imposed exile for a few more weeks or months till I get caught up.

 

[time]

Wonderful posts, Oh Tannin. Things are worse than I feared.

BTW, how can anyone regard 4 seconds, or even 2.5, a reasonable time to open Control Panel?

Fushigi, this is inevitably going to sound patronizing, but why wouldn't medium-sized applications load in less than a second once cached?

An old version of Firefox (actually, when it was still called Firebird) I have here loads in about half a second; Seamonkey in less than a second; Opera in about half a second (1GB Athlon 64/3700 running Win2k with tons of resident processes, eg. PostgreSQL).

Brand spanking new machines I have set up (especially with the wonderful TinyXP) are quicker.

And just to seem even more boorish, I was under the impression that no-one had yet been able to confirm that Readyboost made any tangible difference.

Sorry.