Are you being Vistamized on your mobile PC?
Let’s face the facts, Vista doesn’t run very well on mobile PCs. There, I’ve said it. If you have a mobile PC, a notebook, Tablet PC, UMPC or ultra-portable PC, chances are you know exactly what I"m talking about. It is commonplace for users to take drastic measures to get acceptable battery life or system performance, or at least to get the equivalent performance they had using XP. Visit any forum where mobile device users discuss Vista and you will quickly find many expounding on tweaking Vista to get acceptable results. You’ll find suggestions to disable Aero Glass, turn off file indexing, turn off SuperFetch, turn off the Vista Sidebar, turn off shadow copies, and even to turn off User Account Control (UAC). All of these "tweaks" are being done to get good battery life or to boost the performance of sluggish Vista devices.
Isn’t this a bit ridiculous? Why should Vista require the user to disable some of the best new features of the operating system just to get acceptable performance? Isn’t that like getting a Ferrari and installing a governor on the engine to get good gas mileage? Doesn’t that strike anyone besides me as ironic? Microsoft put a lot of cool mobility features in Vista, like the Mobile Device Center and the Tablet functionality for devices that support those features yet the user must turn off core OS functionality to be able to use Vista on most mobile PCs. That is the height of silly from any angle you view it. I hope that the rumored soon-to-appear Service Pack 1 addresses all of these issues and lets mobile users experience the full operating system as it was intended. I am getting sick of reading about all the hoops that users of these cool devices must jump through just to get the work done. It’s no wonder that the President of Acer is disappointed with Vista. That should raise a giant honking red flag in Redmond.
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You took the word right out of my mouth, i have just bought a Samsung Q1 Ultra and it was unusable out of the box, i had to reinstall vista then apply most of the tweaks you mention and now its a great device, such a shame really and put me off big time at first
File indexing was a problem when I used my Tablet as a second computer; there was a lot of indexing whenever I updated big folders from my main computer. Once I got a dock and used the Tablet as my main computer that problem disappeared.
I turned off UAC for other reasons – many older programs were messed up by it. As an example, even Microsoft’s current version of Process Explorer requires user approval whenever it is run from an Administrator account, making it bothersome to run at startup.
I turned off the Vista sidebar as a frill, and older Tablets won’t run Aero at all.
Now that I’ve fixed the zip file annoyance on Vista (http://annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202), which was also present on XP but less a problem since things I zip like mail now have more constituent files, I find Vista to be about as fast as XP except when copying files, something reportedly being fixed in SP1.
Unfortunately the problem with Vista is not restricted to just older equipment, as Chris’ comment above illustrates. I see the same issues on a Fujitsu P1610 and Lenovo ThinkPad x61, both of which are sold with Vista pre-installed.
I almost feel Windows Vista is the new Windows ME. Perhaps Vista, like ME, simply serves as a stop gap between Windows XP and the rumored Windows 7 to be released in a few years.
As a system administrator, I have to disagree with the idea that these are some of Vista’s “best” features. On the contrary, I find some of vista’s biggest features such as indexing and UAC to be very poorly implemented and not well thought out, resulting in very poor efficiency. Many of these features are just extensions of existing services and functions in XP that were expanded on without a full development cycle. The Sidebar is worthless (and by no measure should it consume the resources it does if it was coded by someone with half a brain), and even the new start menu has some critically stupid UI flaws (the scrolling/expanding/jumping “all programs” list being the most annoying).
Most importantly, taking the new set of features of vista as well as the supposed kernel rewrite into consideration, there is no justifiable reason for the jump from a 2 GB base install to 7-11GB, even for the basic versions. That alone makes it obvious that Microsoft wasn’t even seriously considering portable devices during the engineering of vista.
I see your point BUT it isn’t it an inevitable result of one system trying to service portable and heavyweight desktops? To borrow your analogy anyone that buys a Ferrari and is worried about mileage bought the wrong vehicle.
I recently bought a P1610 and chose XP because it better suited my needs on that platform – though i wanted some of the cool bits of Vista.
Maybe we need to go back to different flavours of Windows for different platforms which then brings a different set of challenges. Don’t you hate it when the real world gets in the way.
Agree with you 100% about Vista, James….
Have done what you and others have suggested to tweak Vista on my new Kohji SH6 and is much better now….of course the 2GB RAM I put into it probably helped a bit too… ;-)
Seems to me if MS was smart they’d release a Vista Mobile edition or a set of options called MobilePC in Control Panel that would give you the right tweaks from the getgo…..
So it goes……
Nick, could be but Vista was touted often in the pre-launch phase about how much better it was going to be for mobile devices. I was not the only one surprised with the difficulties mobile device owners face once it shipped.
Once again have to agree wholeheartedly with ya. Vista on my P1610 is utterly horrible, and this is after removing superfetch, turning off aero, etc etc. 5 minutes just to standby is utterly ridiculous.
Going back to XP on my 1610 is a huge pleasure. I’m hoping that MS really listens to its customers and provides a true solution in SP1, although we all know that is rarely the case. I just cannot understand how the richest company in the world manages to so constantly be behind the curve?
There is nothing about Vista that is anything like any Ferrari. Seriously.
No one in the auto industry ever, ever spoke of any Ferrari product the way people speak of Vista.
How about saying it’s like buying an H3 (also too generous to Vista) and trying to strip it down for racing?