Windows Vista Is A Disappointment
Time to dust off this blog. My wife’s knee replacement surgery went well a couple of weeks ago, and I’m back on Bonaire with the kids. While I was in New Hampshire during Linda’s surgery, I decided to buy a new Hewlett-Packard IQ-770 PC to put in my kitchen back home. The IQ-770, which features a touch screen and family-friendly organization software is also designed specifically for Windows Vista, and seemed like a good fit for family use in a central location.
Using Vista itself was a bit different, obviously, than using Windows XP, which we have all gotten comfortable with. Vista is flashier and prettier - that’s for sure. But on the whole, I still much prefer Windows XP. Here’s why:
- Vista’s prompts asking if I’m sure I want to run some software or do something it deems insecure drive me nuts. I thought the recent bought of Apple commercials with the Windows “guy” dressed in a suit and the Mac “guy” in casual duds to be overblowing the whole “are you sure” prompt thing, but jeez, it’s real. And annoying. I’m sure there’s a way to turn this off (have to go read my friend Ed Bott’s Vista book for this), but out of the box it’s a real turn-off.
- For all these protections, Vista still seems less stable. I had at least three blue screens of death during my set-up of the system when installing both new software as well as Microsoft-supplied updates. And the mouse stopped working after the system came back from being in sleep mode (a reboot fixed that and the touch screen got me to where I could reboot). Things seem to finally be working now, but getting to a working system with the software I wanted running was a hassle. For those wondering, I installed the Student edition of Office 2007, Adobe Premiere Elements 3, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5, Dragon Naturally Speaking (for Vista), and NaturalReader. Oh, and gobs of Windows and driver updates from Microsoft.
- The IQ770 has a 1.6GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core (not a slow CPU by any means) and 2GB of fast memory. So why the heck does it take nearly four (4) !!!! minutes to go from power-on to being fully operational? I haven’t seen horrific boot times like that since Windows 98 on an underpowered machine with zillions of drivers and start-up utilities. Perhaps regular folks can get away with not having to regularly reboot their PCs, but with all the blue screens and problems I found coming out of sleep mode, reboots seemed to be essential. At four minutes, I could probably hunt down a chicken, pry an egg or two out of it and have an omelet ready before the bloody system was done booting. Ridiculous and unnecessary. Note that this boot time didn’t seem to vary much between a clean system and one with software installed.
The one thing I have found in Vista that I like are the widgets you can put on the side of the screen, but that’s pretty minor. The IQ770 is presently in transit from the U.S., and when it gets here I will upgrade to Vista Ultimate when I have a chance to see if it adds any must-have features (from my perspective). One thing I would love Vista to have would be the ability to stream content FROM another Media Center PC, but for some reason Microsoft has determined that all PCs must be servers, and that only Xbox 360s can be Media Center clients. I already have three Xbox 360s and don’t need (or have space) for another one.
And speaking of the HP IQ770 - it’s a very interesting design, and the HP SmartTouch software seems pretty handy, although my use of it was limited in the few days I had with the system before packing it up. One thing that just floors me though is that the machine does not have an input jack for microphone. One of the things I want to use the IQ770 for is voice recognition. While the system does have a built in array microphone, that does not provide enough noise cancellation for my needs, and the handy headset that Nuance provides with Dragon Naturally Speaking is useless without a microphone or line-in jack on the PC. I’m hoping that a USB adapter for a headset I have here will work to overcome that issue.
In any event, so far Windows Vista has left me completely underwhelmed. I don’t know if that’s because I had higher expectations based on all the media fluff Microsoft has been spewing in my direction, or because I am an experienced PC user and have higher standards than an average newbie PC user. Either way, I’m disappointed. Vista is not the WOW that Microsoft advertises. It’s more like WOE - Waste Of Energy.
Too bad my schedule didn’t permit the opportunity for us to meet face-to-face on my recent trip to your tropical neighborhood. I might have been able to bring you to a different conclusion about your first Vista experience.
First, to turn off the User Account Control just open Control Panel and then User Account. You’ll see an option to turn it off. To be honest, I haven’t found it to be that big of a deal, as it seems to learn the things you do repeatedly are safe. Having said that, it can be a pain to deal with when you’re new to the OS.
I have had my new notebook (HP dv6324us) for two weeks now and really have no complaints about Vista. My biggest gripe was the nearly three hours I spent taking off all of the crapware that came with it. Then I turned off all the eye candy, so it looked pretty much like the Win2K machine I have at my office. I later turned all the toys back on, just because they look cool and don’t really seem to significantly slow the machine down.
BTW, I’ll catch up with you on my next visit to the island. I think I feel a fishing vacation attack coming on…
I have turned off the User Account Control - that helps a lot, although now when I reboot or switch log ins, Vista insists on reminding me that I have turned off UAC. Ah well.
I still can’t put the machine in Standby and then have it come out of standby normally. Invariably I either get a Blue Screen Of Death (and Microsoft’s automated error correction suggests a patch which does nothing) or lose my network connection and Media Center. I’m attempting to use the power saving profiles to enter sleep mode, and that seems to be working, although I have no idea if it’s actually saving any power.
See you on your next trip to Bonaire!
Jake
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