Even though vista is innovative and with many features i’d say that my experience with vista even whether i run it on a Q1P or a core 2 duo machine has been poor. Not just because the OS is very resource intensive but because Microsoft just didn’t deliver the product to work decently out of the box, i can understand having to do updates, but hunting for drivers and such is something i don’t expect to have to do.

Bottom line is that the consumer is left to fend for themselves in getting Vista to work on a branded “Vista capable” UMPC, some even advertised with a picture of the device with the Vista Aero glass interface running on the screen.

Microsoft and the UMPC manufacturers should have the OS operating with decent performance, efficient power management, stable, and full functionality of the device’s features out of the box.

That is not an unreasonable consumer expectation for the investment they made for their purchase.

Actually, Vista went RTM last fall, yet eight months later one tablet brand dared make excuses of model update delays caused by “serious errors” within Vista. Funny, now same model finally will be shipping same Vista. Did anyone else notice absence of Vista “errors” affecting other brands launching? Acer’s CEO trash-talked Vista recently with similar vague and merit less comments while dozens other laptop brands are in 3rd and 4th generation model updates smoothly. Only one can be right.

XP was SIX years old until MS offered a patch to make hibernation function at all with more than 1 GB RAM. I waited three years running XP with 2GB RAM before such an elemental function worked. Suggesting that XP even benefited from 2GB RAM was heresy until RAM prices dropped enough for even the most entrenched doubters to stop vocalizing opposition of the whole idea. So much for this sudden venerable pedestal XP has been placed upon. OSX was a mess it’s first two years, only tolerated by devoted user-base without recourse.

The basis of Jame’s Vista performance frustration was clear in his original article and ignored here: disk thrashing. Get it under control and all else become singular issues with either future patches forthcoming or acceptance that speed and hardware spec ratio grew larger than XP, just as every OS evolution ever has and always will.

With all marginal spec hardware running Vista the solution will always stem from getting disk trashing addressed by user-decided trade offs of feature vs responsiveness. Either one or the other but never both running from base-line specs. Only the user can decide if backround processes allowed to auto-run are worth the sluggish outcome when they do. Search indexing, auto-defrag, auto-everything comes with cost: CPU cycles consumed. Consumed becoming runaway crisis of even function when the OS starts paging from disk just trying to keep up. That’s the mysterious Vista freeze-dance in action, until flushed catching up back running from RAM again. It’s not Vista’s fault that hybrid and SSD drives are so slow coming, it’s ready to fly now with support in-place. Any tablet or UMPC cursed with those abysmal 1.8″ hard drives are especially hobbled by a design unchanged four years originally intended for MP3 playback, not running next-generation OS.

The key using such current specs is simply to get Vista only ever reading or writing to disk for reasons clearly associated for an application’s function. Strip away anything that causes Vista to use disk just to run the OS once past desktop loading. A CPU at 5-10% and disk activity LED 95% idle will make Vista hardware numbers fade from importance and allow it to be responsive freed of the backround processes burdens better handled by desktop hardware and future specs.

With time, portable hardware will evolve to not be so fragile choking on Vista default features. Until then, it’s up to the user to choose their OS experience results. But rejecting Vista as broken declarations only will embarrass as luddite later. Either this audience remains leading-edge problem solvers with open-minds who just happen to be bleeding-edge gadget freaks also or slip into whiners with toys allowing bias made into fact, an unthinkable and sad redirection future.

Listen to Kevin and Citantic and anyone else getting the results you crave. Reassurance by rehashing negative group mentality is pointless if their success contradict assumptions. How did admitting Vista got the best of one become fashionable?

Vista has uncanny similarity in structure and tweaking potential with XP, anything that dragged XP can be dealt with in familiar ways and same persistence rewarded with results. If closing lid causes sleep trigger issue, try from Start menu or power button and give an OS still so immature some time to refine. There’s so much it has to offer tablet users in particular that took me many months in full production use to fully appreciate, now rebooting back to XP feels as archaic as 98. Other than UAC (which I turned off for my needs), there’s nothing Vista adds that I haven’t come to appreciate as superior.

Feels like being MVP shill to say, but Vista is a great OS deserving tolerating some quirks to see beyond quick conclusions and discover easily missed subtler refinements, and not in small numbers or insignificant for work flow.

Vista has revolutionized my graphics job handling thousands of image files by accessing, display, editing, selection and folder shuffling to such higher efficiency that going backwards isn’t option ever possible again.

I would love to upgrade my Motion 1300 above 1GB RAM total (2×512) specs limit, does anyone know if BIOS would see 1GB 200 pin DDR 400 or higher chips? I’ve yet to see reports on 1300 or 1400′s success.

Anyone with pokey UMPC struggling running Vista willing to let me prove how much can be attained sent for tweaking as a serious offer, contact me. Anything to move this topic discussion forward and constructive is worth it to me, some hard-core before and after timed tasks to report are sorely needed.

Would a video of Motion 1300 running Vista with PSCS3 28MB tiff open, WMV video playing, IE7 tabbed open, OneNote open then switched back and forth running tasks in real-time be worth the effort in creating, maybe to prove what some user experiences actually are on old hardware?

]]> http://gigaom.com/mobile/kct-opinion-vis/#comment-400201 Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:56:58 +0000 http://jkontherun.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/kct-opinion-vis#comment-400201

I’m running Vista Ultimate on a Motion M1400 with 1 gig of ram. I can’t use Aero, but everything else works fine. Sleep and hibernate have not been a problem. The only difference I’ve noted is a slightly shorter battery life.

My M1400 should scream when I install another gig of ram.

I’m running Vista Ultimate on a Motion M1400 with 1 gig of ram. I can’t use Aero, but everything else works fine. Sleep and hibernate have not been a problem. The only difference I’ve noted is a slightly shorter battery life.

My M1400 should scream when I install another gig of ram.

Well my OQO 02 runs just fine with Vista Business with a Via 1.5 ghz cpu 1 gb ram, upgraded from Xp Tablet. Windows has always historically needed some form of tweaking, how do you think Norton utilities got its big start? Check out Prof. Kenrick in Alaska, doing fine with Vista also.

What Microsoft needs to do is not create another friggin edition just for UMPC, but go back and optimize major bottlenecks to performance, create more intelligent default themes or add improvements based on hardware, and make certain services scalable in performane based on hardware.

Like 95, 98, ME users eventually forced to upgrade to Xp, Xp users will eventually be forced to upgrade to Vista. Don’t understand UMPC vendor lack of support for Vista or putting out models better meant for XP Tablet with Vista out now since Jan/Feb 2007.

Kevin, well thought out, and also well put.

I’m still not buying anything Vista yet!
;-)

Nice article, as always, Kevin. Could you post your current Windows Experience Index scores? Thanks!

Michael, I think one of the reasons you can see decent performance on your machine while having so many applications open is that you have 2 GB of memory, the programs that you list aren’t very processor intensive, and they aren’t doing much when just sitting on the taskbar.

If you were to run something like video encoding in the background while editing Word files and taking notes, etc, you would probably have a different experience.

Now, most mobile users don’t actually have a need to run any heavy duty programs on their mobile machines, which makes the experience just fine, as you say.

Another thing is some machines, like the p1610 and most likely the u810, can’t run more than 1GB ram, which is a shame, but for running one or two office apps at the same time, it should be fine.

The worst part about Vista on the LS800 has been issues related to connecting to a dock that has an external display. The problems include not only the need to reset the display setting manually and the frequent flashing of the computer display after un-docking, but also failure to shut down properly and failure to wake up after sleep. The shut-down and sleep problems occur very frequently after un-docking and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them when I was using the computer with its own display after waking up or restarting successfully in un-docked mode.

People who connect tablets to external displays seem to be those who see the worst part of Vista. People who only use the tablet display have a much better experience because these problems don’t happen and because the processor is less stressed with no external display.

When I’m traveling I have positive experiences like Kevin does. When I dock and un-dock I have negative experience like James does.

My guess is that the problems are due to Vista and some display drivers not working well together (XP was much better but not perfect either). Such display problems in Vista should be fixable, particularly if Microsoft wants to dispel the sense that James expressed that there is something fundamentally wrong with Vista.

i have vista on the oqo2 and it is garbage-a snail moves faster (not sure if it’s the oqo, vista or both.)in any event, unusable even with all the speed enhancing tricks. On the other hand i installed vista on the tablet kiosk 7210, and even with the beta drivers, there is a huge improvement in performance and user experience.

Hard to figure out other vista is a pretty flawed piece of software that is still not ready for prime time.

I would like to add my 2 cents on this. In general, Im not really in love with vista. I have 5 PCs, 4 of them are running XP. The one and only which runs vista is an X41 thinkpad tablet. The tablet features are just great in vista. I must admit, I used a utility called Vlite(http://www.vlite.net/), which basically slims down the Vista installation disk just to the things you select. So it really makes the OS a lot lighter. The whole install is just 4,7Gb…thats not that bad.
Its really a personal decision. No need to blame any OS…as Kevin said there are just too many people with different needs.

“but are you saying that the 600 MHz A100 with the Intel 950 will outperform a 1 GHz Pentium M with the older Intel GMA?”

I think maybe I am, although frankly I don’t know enough about hardware architecture to argue very rationally on this topic. I’m thinking that the combination of the 2GB of memory and the new graphical processing unit are making a HUGE difference in performance over that experienced with other UMPC hardware architectures. And who knows, may the A100 architecture is providing some addition performance boosts, too.

Michael

Oh, and one more comment on multi-tasking under Vista on a UMPC: right now as I type this I’m running Outlook 2007, IE7 with 4 tabs open, Evernote, Life Balance, an Explorer window, and 2 Word 2007 documents. Performance doesn’t seem any slower than if I was only running one program. This is on a 2GB machine, but one that’s running the A100 processor.

Michael

Josh, I can’t comment on the next version of Windows as I have no information to share on it.