teknote systems corporate blog

Recently posted in a Microsoft Watch blog, a technology columnist delivers a scathing review of Microsoft’s Vista operating system:

The Vista experience is broken. It’s long past time to fix it. Not since Windows ME or Mac OS X 10.0 have I observed a more troubled consumer operating system. This is a difficult post to write, because I really don’t want to beat on Microsoft about Vista yet again. But yesterday’s continuation of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit and several conversations I had today are reasons to look at what Microsoft got wrong and why the company should make things right.

Simply put: Windows Vista is a train wreck, but it didn’t have to be. Unfortunately, my “Wow” moment was accepting Windows Vista for what it is. Vista will succeed in the marketplace because of the huge infrastructure built up around the operating system. But that doesn’t mean most people will like using Vista, or even ask for it. [more]

~ “Broken Windows” by Joe Wilcox, eWeek Microsoft Watch, Aug. 9, 2007.

Ditto… ouch.

Windows Vista users complain about long start-up, shutdown and application load times compared with Windows XP.

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 1:00 AM PDT

Windows Vista users are complaining on Microsoft Corp.’s support forums about long start-up, shutdown and application load times compared with Windows XP.

The users, who sound pro-Vista for the most part, have vented about a variety of speed issues on Microsoft’s Performance & Maintenance forum. “I have XP and Vista running side-by-side [but] I twiddle my thumbs waiting for certain apps to load up on the Vista machine while the load is instantaneous on the older XP machine,” wrote a user identified as William. “I’ve tweaked it as best as I could with the info available and I am still very disappointed.” …

A recent review by Steve Wildstrom of Business Week is enough to send potential Vista users running in the opposite direction. Read the entire column here.

More testing needed before Vista deployment:

Microsoft introduced the latest version of its operating system in grand fashion, with parties at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and other tony venues and the ever-present theme, “The ‘wow’ starts now.” But for many agencies the wow will come later rather than now.

Quote

URL: Superfetch, RAM and the meaning of life.

The analysis and reviews of Vista are starting to come in - especially with respect to one of my favorite features - Superfetch. I blogged a bit about this in the past (about how Superfetch will proactively fetch applications into memory based on usage patterns so that they are already paged in from disk before you need them) but I have some real world experience with Vista on a variety of memory configurations and processors now and I’ll offer my own real world experiences…