Vista, Schmista
February 4, 2007
Too often, it seems, I find myself building a new system for myself, my small office, or for family use. Building one for the family is actually pretty easy. Windows, Office, and away we go. My office machine is a little trickier, as I have to account for things like Quickbooks, and that is difficult because somewhere along the line I put myself on this treadmill of having bought one full version followed by upgrades. So I end up installing the original software, then a couple of upgrades, and then I have to go to the Intuit Web site for a patch—blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Really, it should all be easier.
The toughest job is building a new system for myself. Windows, Office, Acrobat, my HTML editor, some XML tools, Firefox, my backup system, and then a bunch of small things that I have grown to use and like—incuding Google Desktop and the Onfolio tool (which unfortunately is now only part of the Windows Live toolbar—oy). Then there are all the settings—network accounts, email accounts, ftp accounts, RSS settings. The details drive me crazy, and I don’t want to count the hours I have spent tinkering with the new machine I bought Thursday evening that is still not 100% “mine.”
The new machine has Windows Vista, by the way. And while I have not done much exploring, Vista is, well, to be polite, underwhelming. I am sure someone with some knowledge could spell out some of the improvements, but it fails the “doh!” test. In other words, it still does poorly what it has always done poorly. It still takes forever for the system to boot and to shut down, and the performance seems, incredibly, worse than my two-year old Model T of a machine, despite the fact that the new machine has four times as much memory and a much, much faster chip. How is this possible?
I am sure that I can improve on the performance. (Well, I assume I can, if I spend some time looking at my power settings, and at what is launched during startup, and how big the paging file is, blah, blah, blah, blah.) But this is exactly my point. It shouldn’t be so hard. We are 20-something years into the personal computer era; why do we still have to baby and tweak and cajole and troubleshoot these systems like they are a whole new invention?
Posted by Bill Trippe at February 4, 2007 6:17 PM
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