Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 15, 2007

Vista ‘Wow’ factor Part 2

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:56 PM

I have spoken a bit about the Vista WOW factor in a previous post and in my last post I had mentioned that I had the opportunity to play some more with Vista on Gaurang’s laptop and had promised to log my ‘WOW’ experience in another post… So here it is. Without any further ado the Vista ‘WOW’ factor. 🙂

Gaurang had bought a new Sony Vaio laptop with is almost the top of the line, dual core, 2GB RAM and looks great. Unfortunately he got it with Vista pre-installed. I had mentioned the issues I had with Vista to him so he told me that it works ok and the automatic trouble shooter works great. According to him if a program crashed it would connect to the internet and would find a solution for the crash. So his Vista install was supposed to be very stable…. Yeah Right.

We wanted to share files between our computers so I enabled SAMBA on my Linux system and shared the folder in XP on my Laptop. I could share files without any issues between both my computers and the connection was pretty fast too. (We were both on a LAN) When I connected to my Linux box using its IP address I would get the password prompt within 2-3 seconds on Vista it would take almost 20 seconds for the password prompt to show up. WOW!

Then once he finally connected he started to copy files over but accidentally selected the wrong set so I asked him to cancel the copy and start again. It refused to cancel the copy. Once we clicked on cancel It said ‘Canceling Copy’ and sat like that for almost 5 mins… (This happened to us multiple times.) We tried killing the process but that killed explorer and we had to log out and back in so that we could see the Desktop again.

Then it kept freezing a lot. In the 1 1/2 days he was here we had to forcfully reboot his system about 10 times (Maybe more). When we applied patches and it asked us to reboot, Gaurang’s comment was “This is the first time today that I am rebooting the system normally” (This was after we had rebooted the box 5-6 times already). WOW!

Vista takes forever to reconnect to the net if you accidentally unplug the network cable. Noticed this because we had cables running all over the place and invariably one of us would pull the wrong cable and disconnect one of the laptop’s. On XP if you unplug the LAN cable and then replug it, it connects back to the net immediately. If the system is set for a dynamic IP it usually gets it within a few seconds. But Vista… If you unplug it, it took it atleast 10-15 seconds to get back on the net and this is not that we unplugged the wire and waited a min and then plugged it back it, It was me tripping on the cable and pulling it out for 1 or 2 seconds max. Talk about annoying.

Also Bit defender is one of the most annoying software ever made. Its like the Bonsai Buddy. Keeps popping up everytime making a nuisance of itself.

The best part was that my laptop is older than his, and is slower with less RAM but it is more responsive compared to his. On Vista without him running any additional programs (Except Antivirus and Firewalls) his system was using ~ 850 – 900 MB of RAM. On my system with me running 4-5 programs together the RAM usage was aprox 400 – 500 MB of RAM.

So after using it for a day I have decided that I am very Happy with Linux and if I have to use Windows I would rather use XP instead of driving myself nuts by trying to use Vista.

Have any of you had any similar experiences with Vista? Do share.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

Cya,
Suramya

2 Comments »

  1. hey..this is one post where you’ll surely get a lot of comments!!
    I mean.. even I enjoy the vista look ‘n’ feel at times.. but it gets so freakin’ slow.. mine is a hp pavilion.. with 1gb ram.. and even when I am running absolutely no other application apart from IE 7, it tends to kinda blow up at times!!.. doesn’t crash..but even stalling isn’t very cool.. is it?.. and trying to find a solution.. whatever it means.. has never ever helped me.. most often you get the “could not find a solution” msg anyways..
    A friend told me that it has these zillion extra services running in the background, which should be stopped before trying to do anything with it.. well.. figuring out which service is actually useful isn’t very easy either.. or is it??

    Comment by Vini — September 20, 2007 @ 9:24 AM

  2. Lets see… Visitors to this blog don’t usually post a lot of comments 🙁 I guess I can’t complain because I too rarely post comments on other blogs.

    Vista is pretty slow but you can tweak it a lot to improve the performance. Techrepublic has a lot of articles and tools on how to Optimize Vista, you can find a list over here: Vista Tweak Resources. Check out Tweak Genie and TweakVI Basic as they look promising.

    Disclaimer: As I don’t have a Vista machine to try them out on, I haven’t tested any of the tools listed in the above resources. So backup before you do something that destroys your system and don’t blame me if anything goes wrong.

    Anyways, How is Hong Kong treating you. How come you don’t blog anymore?

    – Suramya

    Comment by Suramya — September 20, 2007 @ 6:20 PM

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