JK opinion- Vista will never run well on mobile devices
OK, never say never so maybe I’ll temper that remark by saying that Vista will not run well on mobile devices in the foreseeable future. Feel better? I don’t, because we were led to believe that Vista was going to optimize our mobile computing experience. It’s open season on Vista in the media but my focus is on the mobile device space and it’s failing miserably here. I have run Vista on more mobile devices than most folks will ever use and it does something every single day that frustrates the hell out of me. Quite frankly the only reason I still run Vista on my mobile devices is because the new Tablet bits are better than the older XP version, but even that is not enough on some days. And those days are occurring with greater frequency.
So how is Vista failing my mobile experience? First and foremost inthe area of performance. I have not seen adequate performance runningVista on anything less than a Core 2 Duo processor. Those are onlyavailable in the larger Tablets so the UMPCs and smaller Tablets areout of luck. Vista also needs 2 GB of memory to run well and thesmaller mobile devices usually are only offered with 1 GB, which isn’tenough. The dreaded disk thrashing that occurs with too little memoryleaves the device unresponsive to the user until it’s done doingwhatever it’s doing, and that takes way too long on the slowerprocessors. I can’t even imagine trying to run Vista on the new Intelmobile processors, the A1xx series. Their performance clocks in at theold Celeron speeds, and Vista chokes all the time on slowerprocessors. It’s going to take the ability for OEMs to put Core 2 Duoprocessors in these small devices to get acceptable performance, andthat won’t happen any time soon due to heat problems. I do not have agood outlook on resolving the Vista performance problem on mobiledevices in the near future.
Run Vista on mobile devices like notebooks and Tablet PCs with the Core2 Duo processors and performance is decent enough overall, but Vistastill has brain farts often enough that the device sits there andfrustrates the user. Who knows what it’s doing when it freezes uptemporarily but bottom line who cares? It shouldn’t do that. If youuse Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-laland where the device fails to resume properly. Sometimes the devicecomes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful. Othertimes it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a fewseconds. Both of these situations require a hard boot by turning offthe power, which not even the OS likes, and then sitting through a boottime even longer than normal. If you call several minutes to bootnormal. These failures are real killers on slower machines as the boot process goes on seemingly forever. Even "proper" resumes onmost mobile devices can sometimes take 45 seconds or longer which is a realproductivity killer for the road warrior needing to do somethingquickly. The whole experience can be summed up in one word-frustrating. Scratch your eyes out frustrating. That is so sad it’sincredible to me that as mobile devices mature the OS can’t keep up andin fact makes the user experience worse.
One of the most beneficial things you can do to improve the mobiledevice experience is use it with a dock. Don’t even get me startedwith how badly Vista handles docking and undocking of these mobiledevices, especially if you hang an external monitor off the dock.Screen flickering and flashing, time wasting confusion as Vista triesto figure out what to do. The icing on this flickering cake is whenVista fires up the UAC in the middle and asks for permission tocontinue. This fires off additional rounds of screen flickering anddisk thrashing enough to give the user concern that the system is goingto hang up. Just for grins I’ve refused the permission request to seewhat would happen and you get the same flickering and disk thrashingjust to get back where you started. How silly is that? Rotating thescreen on Tablet PCs, something they are designed to allow, canrandomly fire off the same disk thrashing system tie-up. So much so that I have to consider whether the risk of a slowdown is worth rotating the screen. That is utterly ridiculous to me.
Speaking of disk thrashing Vista fires off a round at the mostinopportune times. The whole system is unresponsive while the OS doeswho knows what, the cursor won’t move, the user taps stuff to see ifthe system will respond, which fires off unexpected actions from thecached mouse clicks. This happens on every single mobile device I haveused, even the very fast ones. It’s really embarrassing when you areshowing off a new device, emphasis on new, and have to answer thequestion "what’s it doing now?". Especially when the answer is "Idon’t know". This not only completely stops the mobile user from doing needed work but I am convinced it drains the battery unnecessarily, theultimate taboo while mobile.
I have probably used more mobile devices than just about anyone alive.I have used them running Windows XP and all flavors of Vista. Deviceswith Pentium M processors or Core Solo will run XP just fine, even withonly 512 MB of memory. Sure, performance is much improved with atleast 1 GB of RAM, but XP will still run acceptably with only 512 MB.That same processor with 1 GB of memory will choke running Vista oftenenough to ruin the user experience. You’d better have 2 GB of RAM toeven consider running Vista with a poky Pentium M processor, and eventhen you’ll experience the odd slow-down. The scary thing is thatthese Core Solo processors are faster than the processors used in mostUMPCs being currently released, and Vista mangles the performanceenough to give serious concern.
The whole Vista mobile experience is very unstable and that isunsettling to anyone who needs to get their work done, and get it donenow. I don’t care how pretty the OS is or how much new sophisticatedstuff is going on under the hood if it makes my performanceunpredictable. That is such a big step backwards that you have towonder how it can be fixed in the short term. I fear it can’t. Saywhat you will about Windows XP the one thing it is on mobile devices isstable. Rock-solid stable. Can anyone say that about Vista on mobilePCs? I have a very bad feeling about theimmediate future of mobile computing on the Vista platform. And thathits me where I live.
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I could not agree more with you. On my P1610 Vista ran so badly that I dual boot into XP 100% of the time. I basically handed over cash to MS for nothing, since my Vista OS just sits on a partition doing nothing of benefit.
The other kick in the ass is that we have to wait so long for SP1. A sneak peek at I think it was PCmag revealed that SP1 had pretty decent improvements. But who knows when we will get that.
I haven’t used Vista in a production environment precisely because of the same problems you describe existing in the RC1 and RC2 releases.
I tried it on my Tablet, and although I liked the Tablet PC bits and Mahjong Titans, that wasn’t a significant motivation to use Vista considering how much I hated everything else about it.
I hate the Network Center (actually I just hate Vista networking in general). I hate the Mobility Center. I hate the performance.
I run the Zune Desktop Theme for XP so I already have the slick looking “black” interface sans transparency (which who really cares about that?), so what motivation do I have for wanting Aero?
There are no worthwhile applications that require Vista yet, so that’s not a motivator either.
Frankly, I installed the so-called Performance and Compatibility Packs on some test machines we use at work, and I haven’t seen much of an improvement there either.
The bottom line is that Vista is just an all around resource hog, and unless SP1 works a miracle the way SP2 did for XP, I don’t see the outlook changing on Vista.
But, I do see a trend in Microsoft’s OS releases:
3.0 was horrible, but 3.1 and 3.11 were great.
95 was pretty decent, but 95B was great.
98 was horrible, but 98SE was great.
ME was horrible, but 2000 (regardless of SP) was great.
XP was pretty decent but insecure, XPSP2 is great.
Vista is horrible, what will we see with SP1?
Guys, I don’t know what you are talking about. Yesterday I was working in my Q1 and I was thinking for myself, I’m so happy with Vista responds time in my Q1 that I’m afraid to move on to any of the new coming UMPCs.
I have been optimizing it, but not so deep as others. I do not have any more those HDD bashing. The only thing that I would improve would be the time to come back from Hibernation but I have to say also that I have a lot of programs working in my taskbar and around 70 process running all time.
And that’s in a Q1 Celeron running at 900 MHz. I tested Vista in a eo v7110 (VIA). It was slow and once the beta expired and have not comeback to Vista, I stayed in XP because I considered Vista too much for that processor. But… I had only 1 GB in that machine while in my Q1 I have 2 GB. And I mention this RAM difference because believe me, Vista does not run well in 1 GB of RAM. The performance is increased a lot just by adding that extra gibabyte.
In conclusion, I think that Vista is perfect for UMPCs but… it has to be optimized. I think that Microsoft should create some kind of optimization profiles where people can select what is better for them. And I say this because I’m that James, Kevin and other people reading our blogs can follow our optimization instructions but that’s probably 10% or less of all consumers.
Ctitanic, you more than all others are proving my point. You spent months “optimizing” Vista to get it to provide acceptable performance. If I remember correctly you turned off various OS services, hacked the registry, and as you state added 2 GB of memory to a mobile device that doesn’t even ship with that much memory. That’s exactly what I’m talking about here and you are spot on that the average consumer can’t do this stuff. So they buy a machine with lousy performance and wonder why the platform doesn’t work well for them. Your device is now configured better than most if not all of the mobile PCs shipping today. Vista will not work well out of the box on these devices. That is my whole point.
James, how about a comment on the differences between XP Tablet bits and Vista Tablet bits.
My next machine will be a tablet; currently undefined but my short list is the HP2710, Lenovo X61 and the Fujitsu P1610.
Anyway, I intended to run Vista on the new machine because of Tablet bits comments but now, I almost think I should go stay with XP.
Unless, of course, Apple comes out with a 12 or 13 inch tablet if I can get a Notes program for OSX
..wiley
Not only that but then throw in other promises that actually cause more problems they solve, thank you Readyboost. We actually just got a new Lenovo X61T with Vista installed on it. Problem was that only has 1 GB RAM, it had always intended to have XP on it. Now I am waiting for more memory to come in while the user of the device constantly chews me out for the poor performance.
YES! I have an X60 Tablet with Vista (Core Duo, 1GB RAM) and it feels like I experienced every single problem that you describe here – ever tried to get something done on the last 10 mins of battery, but the system would not stop thrashing until the power ran out? Just thinking about it makes me reach for my pills…
I would install XP at once if it weren’t for the tablet tools. Even my first tablet (a 386 Thinkpad with Win3.11) wasn’t such a performance nightmare.
Peter
James,
Your forgetting that when XP was released, people spent tons of time trying to optimizing it because it had it’s problems. Heck, when my parents bought a new notebook last year, I had to spend time turning certain things off to optimized XP.
Up to this point I’m enjoying Vista. I spend about 20 minutes turning certain things off, but once I done that, I have Vista running just as well as it did on XP. And the notebook is a Acer Celron M 1.5, with 512MB!!!! Yes it’s Vista Basic, but Vista runs with no problems. I have no problems connecting to the network. I have no problems surfing the net.
I believe Vista will be there one day. But I think Microsoft should of created another version of Vista. Vista for Mobile(or Smaller) machines. Ultimate, Business, Premium, MOBILE, and Basic.
Frankly, I thought your team was exaggerating the problems with Vista and docking. How could it possibly be that bad?
And then I tried using my new dock with my new Fuji notebook last night. Holy cow! You weren’t exaggerating at all!
Fortunately Fujitsu put an XP install disk with my new notebook. I think I’m going to use it this weekend…
James,
Your forgetting that when XP was released, people spent tons of time trying to optimizing it because it had it’s problems. Heck, when my parents bought a new notebook last year, I had to spend time turning certain things off to optimized XP.
Up to this point I’m enjoying Vista. I spend about 20 minutes turning certain things off, but once I done that, I have Vista running just as well as it did on XP. And the notebook is a Acer Celron M 1.5, with 512MB!!!! Yes it’s Vista Basic, but Vista runs with no problems. I have no problems connecting to the network. I have no problems surfing the net.
I believe Vista will be there one day. But I think Microsoft should of created another version of Vista. Vista for Mobile(or Smaller) machines. Ultimate, Business, Premium, MOBILE, and Basic.