Not sure what this is all about? Some sort of voicing frustration with Vista and mobile devices? Well, I’m afraid I can’t fully agree.

I used Vista since day 1 of the first beta.
Yes, Vista eats up more resources but it also is a safer and more stable OS than Windows XP is. Don’t believe it? Well, maybe because you don’t want to? Or because you believe all that crap floating around the internet about Vista performance?

I have Vista running on a Sony Vaio UX90S (1GB RAM, 32GB SSD), a Samsung Q1 Ultra Baron (2 GB RAM though!), an OQO e2 (1.6GHz, 32GB SSD) and other mobile devices (mostly ultraportable laptops) with single processors and usually 1GB RAM, processor speed usually not higher than 1.2 GHz. Does Vista work perfectly? Well, it runs fine with Office 2007 and other programs but has some quirks especially with iTunes.
Turning Aero off (who needs this anyway), turning the Sidebar off, turning off some visual effects like mouse/menue shadows already enhance performance a lot and make the Vista experience pretty enjoyable, even on tiny mobile devices.
Especially the SSD versions of my gadgets usually don’t have real problems to run iTunes videos, so I suppose that the performance bottle neck is actually the HDD speed.

So yes, Vista is definetely having some performance issues compared to Windows XP but they’re not as dramatic as people want us to believe. Turning Aero off already takes some pressure away from Vista and I also have the feeling that you need to use always the latest drivers/software for everything to run smoothly with Vista.

Making a general statement that Vista doesn’t work well with mobile devices is untrue and confusing. Of course I don’t play 3D games on these gadgets, I usually use Office 2007, some ftp/SQL utilities, the Internet Explorer, iTunes (always latest version since Apple is improving Windows performance with each version) and…believe it or not and it works fine…Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Even the Samsung Q1 Ultra with that crappy A110 Intel machine and 800 MHz seems to work fine with iTunes, you just need to adjust the screen size (full screen gives you stuttering but reducing it by around 20% works fine!) and of course to turn off Aero.

Also, believe it or not: all these machine are running Norton Internet Security 2008 in real-time in the background, protecting ALL processes. ;-)

Vista is not going to be accepted beyond techie geeks if it doesn’t work out of the box.

Even though computers and the Internet are not toasters, the media and manufacturers have made everybody believe that using them are as easy as using a toaster.

You throw your bread in, and if it’s too light, you turn it up. Next batch is too dark, you turn it down. 2-3 tries, and then you always have your toast the way you like it.

It’s because it doesn’t behave like a toaster that Linux hasn’t caught on with Mom and Pop in Podunk. And it’s also why UMPCs and their kin have not either.

Woadan
Professional Curmudgeon

Not an about face dre. That earlier article was about the fact that I could get Vista running at all on the P1610 because Fujitsu took their good time to get Vista capable drivers. That article goes on to mention some problems with docking and undocking, problems that continue today. Subsequent articles deal with all the registry tweaks that need to be done to get reasonable performance.

What an about-face from this earlier article…

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/wireless/ontherun/archives/the-state-of-vista-on-the-fujitsu-p1610-13605

James, you are quite correct. The sad thing is that I haven’t had real good luck with it being stable on “larger” mobile devices either.

I had a tricked out Toshiba M-400 Tablet with a Core- Duo and 2 GB of RAM. I did the Vista Upgrade and it was dreadful. I then did a totally new format of the hard drive and did a dean install. I got more “blue screens” in 1 month than I had in all my computing years combined !

My Toshiba suffered! I sold it for sixty cents on the dollar (which killed me) and bought a Motion LE 1700 running XP. You couldn’t make me put vista on it. Microsoft had a better product with Windows ME and I thought I’d never say that. Cuddos to you for having the guts to tell it like it is!

Hello James. I have been reading your blog for a long time. I am an IT profession. I have my own clients and I work at a small bank.

I will NOT recommend Vista to anyone…at all. The only thing good is the hard drive encryption.

The problems XP had now have been raised to a new level in Vista. The problems you outline here have been in XP, but to leaser degree. I have always had to get a patch for these problems. Why does the end user have to work so hard to get something fundamental to work? My Apple friends do not have these issues. Things just work. (I am not talking about application corruption as that happens on both platforms)

I think the main problem is how Vista uses memory on the machine. Instead of using the memory efficiently it is a hog. This is accepted by the industry as then the customer will then buy more memory, better video or a better hard drive. There is something ethically wrong here. Why is Vista with a fast processor 1Gig plus of RAM running slower than older OS’s? For the money and the processing power Vista should be very very fast.

Microsoft needs to address this ASAP. I am not comfortable recommending Vista to anyone. When I price a computer today I tell the vendor to include XP not Vista.

Thanks James – er should I say no thanks!

Was about to purchase the Fujitsu P1610 with Vista this week, but now confused – perhaps XP tablet edition better.

Two Question back to you James on P1610:
1. If you had the choice today would you get XP or Vista (even with shortcomings.
2. Any way we could increase the memory from 1GB to 2GB – why doesnt Fujitsu supply 2GB?

Thanks

Well, as someone who has been buying small PCs since I first got the U70, Vista has been fine for me with relatively no tweaking. I tend to be more of a power user and I always max out memory and change hard drives to put a faster one in if I can.

I currently have a Sony VGN-G1 as my main laptop computer. It’s got a Core Solo 1.33, 2GB of RAM, and a 32GB SSD. This thing is, for the most part, every bit as fast (if not a tad faster) as the SZ90 I have with 3GB of RAM and a 7200rpm drive. It’s not the drive, because the Vista experience number is very close. Hands down, it’s the best small PC I’ve owned. I can easily run 3 or 4 VMWare images and still use Office with no problems.

Comparing my older Sharp MW70J (Japanese version of the M4000) which had a Pentium M 1.73, 1.5GB of memory, and a 7200rpm drive, the G1 blows it away even with Vista. VMWare would choke that thing.

Just as an FYI, my SZ really didn’t run faster with XP vs. Vista. It’s about the same. So the OS choice there didn’t affect me at all.

I know many have had issues with Vista out of the box and I agree it should perform better even with 1GB of memory like XP did with 512MB. Hopefully SP1 will fix that. However, Vista for me hasn’t been the horror show some have experienced and I like it much better than XP as a mobile platform.

Anyway, I’m sorry for repeating myself but as I posted at GBM:

“Whatever the reasons for Vista’s performance, surely what matters is Microsoft’s response? They’ve had almost a year, since releasing Vista to manufacturing, to work on updates.

- the Reliability & Compatibility updates came only a few weeks ago, 7 months after retail release/9 months after corp
- after a year of work, SP1 is due in December as a beta – A BETA!
- the monthly release schedule produced expected security patches rather than OS updates, though occasional driver updates have made steps in the right direction

With all the programmers & related resources that it has available, Microsoft’s efforts have shown very little results. The three points listed above demonstrate that they’ve been doing SOMETHING, but it also shows that they haven’t produced much.

Is anyone resentful about Microsoft’s plan to release SP1 as a beta, after over a year working on it? Is anyone encouraged by it?”

So, clearly I agree with you, James and I’m amazed at how the Vista situation is unfolding. But its brought to light some startling discoveries for me. Its all confirmed, to as much an extent as is possible, that there’s something behind all this that helps make sense of it all – which isn’t the same as justifying it since its obviously not proving to be an entirely successful way of doing things for Microsoft customers like you and I!

Please note up front that I’m a longtime Mac nerd and have come back into the Microsoft world full force via the TabletPC, though I’ve supported and maintained Microsoft products (SBS, SharePoint, WinXP, etc) for years in my day job. The upshot is starting in 2005, for the first time since the early 90s, I got to watch how Microsoft does things, but this time from the eyes of a ‘grownup’. Reading the blogs of Microsoft employees helped a lot. (That was a strategy with potential dividends definitely not missed by Microsoft.)

First, Microsoft’s OS goals are motivated by the enterprise market, not the consumer market. Duh, you might say, but hey! I’ve been ‘wandering in the wilderness’ for 13 years – when I last looked up, ‘shoegaze’ was all the rage! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoegazing) This is significant because a small, lean Apple can move fast on product strategies when dealing with the consumer space – hell, they had 3 major OS releases in five years! Given the kickback by Dell and other OEMs when faced with a retail Vista rollout just before Christmas 2006, can you imagine their reaction if this happened EVERY year for four years? Microsoft can’t be as nimble for loads of reasons I’d never considered – that doesn’t mean you and everyone else hadn’t recognized this, of course. But IMO its helpful to bring it up in this context. The proof is in the fact that Microsoft CHANGED their retail release plan to suit those OEMs.

Second, Microsoft has established perhaps the best (happiest?) place on the planet for IT people to work. They’ve done this by removing the rat-race as much as possible, developing a career path for everyone from the paper-jam jockeys (like me!) to the Unit Managers. IT is still very young in the business world and executives on down to assistants still don’t know what IT people really get up to, in the same way that they understand what accountants do; if this isn’t the case, then why are accountants paid so much more than IT staff? The accountants have had hundreds of years to carve themselves an identity in the business world. Anyway, somehow, Microsoft made it possible to be a programmer/developer without a 3-pack a day habit, be healthy, and have relationships longer than a few minutes (!?) up against a wall in the back of a club (ok, minutes sounds optimistic, but not when foreplay (the pizza) and cuddling (ie: cigarette) is included!). When even the testers and interns can have what Maxim or even Jugs magazine would characterize as “a life”, we can’t expect the kind of results that are characterized by Apple’s early days or current shareware developers.

So, within this giant, IT-safe, bureaucratic workplace, its not so much about the customer as it is about the process; sure the customer motivated the original development of this process but the argument stands: a better product will roll out the door in the end, and thats what drives any business – see Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit’s recent ‘pr’ on the delay of Office 2008 for Mac to see this approach in action.

Third, the software industry (perhaps following Microsoft’s lead or perhaps simply falling victim to the demands of the new marketplace) has changed its goal of releasing finished products to releasing works-in-progress. Everyone from Apple to Microsoft to Xandros now work this way and it has a lot to recommend it. Ship a product and with the new broadband world its easy to address any shortcomings. We’ve been effectively living in this world for a long time but Vista may be the first time its been evident on such a large scale.

The promised Vista SP1 fits this ‘theory’ and why it matters is to do with expectations – your article sets out the parameters of those expectations very well: what worries me is that we can no longer apply the same expectations that a lot of us grew up on, the ‘world order’ has changed, requiring a new set of expectations. We are being expected to ‘work with’ Microsoft as they release updates; whether they are ‘beta quality’ can hardly be a valid point when the original software (Vista in this case) was of similar quality upon release.

Instead, the SP1 beta release will serve as an ongoing updating, testing, and tightening effort – its just badly named given the new world order. For instance, since its release in May 2005, Apple has released ten point releases to Tiger; thats about once every 3 months over 27 months – not including security patches. In Microsoft’s parlance these ten updates would be viewed as Service Packs. But Microsoft won’t be able to release as many Service Packs – the OEMs etc would freak.

Are we now stuck with this way of doing things. If this really is whats happening, then why couldn’t Microsoft have released the beta of SP1 in July and followed with a schedule of regular updates? Thats anyones guess but I’m thinking their work culture has informed the state of updates as much as anything. Perhaps they’re sensitive to the perception that Vista’s delay was due to making it properly fit for release and have been avoiding quick (or slow) update schedules for fear that the enterprise market would scream and retreat on their Vista transition plans if they ‘see proof’ that Vista is not as ready as they were led to believe. Apple’s method of an update every two months is cool for consumers but as I said earlier, the enterprise market would have a lot of problems with such an approach.

Finally, while it looks to be the case, Microsoft is not actually making this up as it goes forward. According to Microsoft’s Partner site, Windows XP will not be available to anyone but builder/OEMs after January 2008. As mental as it sounds, they do have a strategy; they are on a path and following it. However, its as much of a strategy as you CAN have in a marketplace where the enterprise is dictating the schedule in more ways than is always apparent; mix in the time it takes to develop and test with the usual delays and soon, the prospect of leaving Vista customers alone (except for security updates) for a year with a new OS makes some kind of mad sense. Its obscene but they’ve got us by the short hairs with one hand while the other caresses and placates the enterprise. Unfortunately, no individual is Microsoft’s customer. If we want that kind of experience, then the closest you’ll find is probably Apple, based primarily on their product release/update cycle. We’re stuck with this new world order and its corresponding slow pace. Sadly, its all about making things easier for Microsoft and the enterprise.

So perhaps instead of beating up the manufacture of the OS which is clearly well beyond the capabilities of the OEM, maybe people should be criticizing the OEM’s or Intel, etc. for not stepping up to the plate and building a proper device? Do you really think that Apple could get the same performance on their old chip architecture that they are getting under Intel? Come on, it’s time for the OEM’s to stop making low end crap and really build something that can work. How many DECADES now have we accepted a battery life of 3 hours? When you get to address the issues from hardware to software like Apple you can correct these types of issues, Microsoft isn’t proprietary in that manner however and must address their issues like the Automotives do with the Union’s. Look at the iPhone, it’s battery talk time is 8 HOURS!!! The new Verizon PPC 6800 coming out in September is 4!!!! Not even close. Who’s fault is that? Microsoft’s or the Vendor? Now look at the software applications you can install and you are virtually unlimited in choices.

No offense, but I’m tired of hearing how Vista blows when it doesn’t. It’s a good OS that is ahead of the hardware curve. Time people direct the fodder where it rightfully belongs. Some is ours, but most is the OEM trying to sell you a “killer” system for $399.00.

It’s alright people saying ‘We had this problem with XP. Get over it.’ What’s wrong with Microsoft learning from their mistakes? Isn’t that one of the things that makes humans ‘different’ from other animals?

They had over 5 years to iron out basic problems and they haven’t. I’ve installed these two latest ‘updates’ and I’m still having the same problems of slow file transfer on the same computer and crawling network speeds on file transfer (not only on mobile PCs). And don’t get me started on that UAC! Even though I’ve turned it off I still get a warning about it when I restart the computer (usually after yet more Windows updates).

Rewind back to 2003: XP SP2 shipped on latest 1 Gz Pentium M Tablets with 1GB RAM (even heresy then to suggest beneficial). New owners furious how slow to boot, how slow to run, how slow to shut down, how whatever to underwhelm expectations “newest” OS performed on “newest” hardware.

Usual good advice was to dump Norton, tweak startup and running processes, choose new software installs wisely, and other predictable boilerplate user involvement simply because they were solutions that worked. The OS could be rendered to crawl or made fly by such choices.

Fast forward to present: nostalgia towards XP SP2 colored by Core Dou processor speeds masking such historical issues made less relevant makes similar Vista issues appear unique instead of evolutionary. The same fat trimming applied to Vista provides the same benefits as did 2003 era XP SP2.

There’s never any “disk thrashing” on mine simply because ALL such backround processes were wisely deselected. Those are features better handled by desktops, as always. Certainly the last thing to burden 1.8″ drive UMPC with, ever. Not one can’t be easily turned off. If by design they couldn’t, that would have been true issue.

The need for user involvement in getting full OS speed remains unchanged. Neither has both open mind attitude and persistence to accomplish diminished in value, nor rejecting myths perpetuated by negative group mentality lessened as factors affecting successful outcomes.

My 1Gz 1GB RAM 2003 tablet runs Vista as well and as fast and stable as when booted XP SP2, if not actually clearly better, certainly Sleep 100% reliable. Only external monitor support single exception and no docking experience.

On my tablet, Vista made XP ancient history without benefit even running four year old technology, by accounts here an assumed impossibility.

Then again, XP SP2 rarely was regarded as “rock stable” venerable OS in 2003.

Quite frankly I’m actually amazed that it runs at all. Motherboard is one company, cpu by other, ram-third, video-whatever that new start up is?… none of the drivers digitally signed by Microsoft and yet!!! it boots up. After this ungodly fit we pour a myraid of different software some of which was made years ago written in a combination of fortran, pascal and tied in together in VB… Ha! sitll works but it has hick ups now. I guess I need to get more Ram?
and while at it I’ll get this super cool new MP3 player made by BreakEveryPatentAndRun and sync it with my pc via the drivers that came on a shiny CD. I will also download every single gadget off the net …cause it will give me that extra stuff I need!!!
I’ll talk to all my friends on MSN, AOL, Yahoo messengers just to name a few install desktop search from MS and the one from Google just in case if I need to find something real fast…
IT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN… Well not yet, but we are almost there. Windows Vista needs a service pack 2 or 3, but most likely it needs MS to make their own closed proprietary system lets call it Windows Vista Elite which runs only what and on what MS approves. No BS, no betas, if the soft doesn’t work you get a 100% refund.

Mind you even Mac which tightly controls everything is nowhere as stable as it should be when you think of what windows is up against.

Great article, all we need now is for you to talk about activesync and we have hit your 2 pet peeves.

:)

I forgot to mention that I’m not using a dock but by the sounds of things I’m glad I’m not :) Following the attention that this issue has received here and at GBM recently, I hope MS issue a fix sooner rather than later.

Like CTitanic I’ve also switched off Superfetch and a couple of other unnecessary services like Parental Controls. I don’t think this really counts as full on tweaking but I will concede that it would be nice if this sort of thing was available as a simple option for users – the problem is that it’s highly specific and unlikely to be easy to create a profile that targets certain services. Anyway, I’m currently playing around with this tweak I found at neowin to see if it will allow me to run superfetch without it effecting boot times (http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=ee91a2cb835b61ab3d85b453ca1300e2&showtopic=583150)

I don’t experience any abnormal disk thrashing and things like waking from sleep, screen rotation happen instantly – no brain farts here.

Of course, the P1610 is not the most powerful laptop in the world and I don’t expect too much from it. It will run apps like VS.NET but only just, because of the 1Gb RAM limit. This would be the case with XP as well. I’m also careful about what I install on my PCs and I don’t let apps like Skype, MSN Messenger, etc. start automatically as there’s no need to have these things running if I don’t need to use them. I think this is a really important fact that a lot of people ignore as all these little things loading at startup slow your boot times and will effect your system’s performance and battery life to a certain extent. This is the case with XP as well as Vista.

In regards to program compatibility, Microsoft’s guidelines are no secret and a program that followed them in XP should be compatible in Vista. If a program isn’t compatible with Vista then that is the developer’s fault, not Microsoft’s. Additionally, Microsoft made it clear that they were going to enforce some rules like not writing to system folders, the registry, etc. long before Vista was released to consumers and they still made an effort to try and get Vista to deal with programs that break these rules gracefully- what more could they do?

The main point I do agree with however is that OEMs should be releasing better hardware to meet the needs of modern operating systems. As people expect their OS to do more it is naturally going to require better hardware. I see far too many laptops and PCs being sold with Vista and low-end processors or too little RAM.

I also think that all the moaning about Vista on the internet at the moment is ignoring the fact that every version of Windows has had a few issues prior to the release of the first service pack. Why should Vista be any different? Once SP1 comes out I hope that most of the concerns will be addressed but in the meantime people just need to be patient. I also hope that users learn to take responsibility for their PCs – if you are getting BSODs for instance then it’s most likely due to faulty hardware or an incorrect driver setup.