XP is back on Miyagi- XP 1 -Vista O
The mess that Vista SP1 made of Miyagi, my Fujitsu P1610, just got worse and worse. I was getting a BSOD every 10 minutes or so and Miyagi was totally unusable as a result. It was evident I was going to have to rebuild the Fuji to get rid of SP1 and when I said I was going back to XP rather than reinstall Vista I wasn’t kidding. Last night I restored to XP using the Restore disc that shipped with the P1610 and that went flawlessly. In about 20 minutes the Fuji was back to the factory state and waiting for me to reload my programs and data.
Program install went without a hitch and in short order I had my core work configuration up and running. I then copied all my data using the Asus EasySync cable that came with my R2H. EasySync is a USB cable that plugs into two computers and it has the transfer software in flash memory on the cable itself so there was nothing to install. The two computer’s files opened up in tiled windows and I just drug and dropped my documents and all my music from the HP to the Fuji. It was 20 GB of files but took less than an hour, the EasySync cable is very fast indeed.
Once I had all my data copied over I downloaded and installed Windows Desktop Search to enable instant searching in Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007. In just 20 minutes it had indexed all my 40,000+ files and searching is lightning fast as a result. My work will be easy to do with the system now fully functional. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed using the P1610 until I couldn’t use it for a few days. It feels so good to have Miyagi back!
I should cover how well the Fuji is running under XP compared to Vista. Can you say snappy? I knew you could. That’s how Miyagi is running now, I had not complained about how the Fuji ran under Vista prior to SP1 mucking things up because the performance wasn’t bad. I wasn’t having performance problems with Vista on this device severe enough to make me regret loading Vista, just the occasional disk thrashing and slow resumption from sleep mode. Those awful docking/ undocking graphics problems were annoying too. Now that I’ve got XP loaded back on it is apparent to me how much faster it is now than before. Standby and Resume takes a couple of seconds, and I don’t find the hard drive active unless I’m doing something with it. The system is downright fast, and I am a very happy camper. I would compare the overall performance of the P1610 with XP as fast as that of the HP 2710p with Vista. That’s impressive when you compare the specs:
Fuji- 1.2 GHz Core Solo processor; 1 GB of memory, 60 GB hard drive
HP- 1.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of memory, 100 GB hard drive
That’s pretty telling when a much better equipped mobile PC running Vista Business runs about as good as a much older device running XP. Based on my experience with the P1610 for the past 24 hours I would not recommend anyone who is buying one of these, and I highly recommend the device, to order a model with Vista. I can’t state it any clearer than that and I do get asked that question a lot.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
James:
I don’t understand it at all. It makes me want to scream “WAKE UP” to MS. Vista is a dog – make that a DOG on mobile devices. I’ve already mentioned my utter frustration at not being able to spend my hard earned gadget dollars on a new laptop/tablet/umpc because Vista simply doesn’t work well on them. I returned an X61 tablet and a Sony T series (which was gorgeous) because Vista was slow and buggy.
I can’t/won’t/shouldn’t have to spend hours trying to tweak and debug that disaster of an operating system to try and minimize BSOD’s from occurring. I was hoping that SP1 would clear up most of the problems so that the OS would be stable enough to warrant spending $$$ on mobile devices again. Based upon your experience – probably not.
And while you have been an outspoken advocate about Vista’s problems on mobile devices, I don’t think you have gone far enough. I know from speaking with some gadget friends, that Vista is the *sole* reason they are not spending money on new laptops and mobile computing devices. Think about that for a moment – right now computers are running better chips, some of the new hardware is gorgeous, intuitive, interesting and very enticing – but my days of playing programmer are over. I want my OS to work out of the box (normal tweaks excepted) – and I demand that my OS be stable. Is that so much to ask for? Vista is single-handedly stopping me (and others) from purchasing a new device. That’s scary. And sad.
Your comments resonate here.
I recently bought a Fujitsu U1010 with VISTA. I’d planned to buy an XP pre-installed version but just couldn’t get hold of one. Despite tweaking extensively, the machine is just too slow to use. I’ve still had no reply from Fujitsu tech support in regards to obtaining XP Tablet recovery disks/ XP installation solutions. I tried to install XP with the drivers yesterday but many of the devices don’t work and the device is about as useful as a paperweight. All in all, it’s not been a good experience so far…..My Sony UX280 with XP Pro continues to perform flawlessly.
When will the manufacturers and Microsoft realise that VISTA is NOT appropriate for the majority of current microPCs / UMPCs /palm-laptops? A dedicated VISTA-lite or UMPC-XP is needed!
Basically, VISTA on those little toys is unusalbe.
Well, it’ll certainly stop ME buying any more mobile PC hardware unless it comes with XP or a customised OS pre-installed and most others in this house now feel the same. Trying to get my hands on a full copy of XP tablet OS is still a ‘works in progress’ here in Oz! I just hope that the manufacturers realise that VISTA is killing off the microPC/ UMPC market, just when the hardware is maturing. Most people want something that works after the unboxing ceremony rather than beginning a few days of extended technical adjustments punctuated by poor customer support experiences, long internet searches, a few failed experiments and the occasional *@#$%^** expletive…..Bill Gates and Mr Fujitsu- I hope you’re listening!
Bluescreens? Sounds like you got sh!t drivers, not that the OS blows. Fujitsu is one company that *will not* provide any sample machines prior to them releasing for us to do testing with and then when they release a system that turds out they squak.
I am not saying we do not buy machines, but when other OEM/ODMs build hardware we get a chance to dev in concert with the prototype hardware as we do the OS work.
Oh sure, some say OS should be stable reguardless of the hardware and while we have our fair share of bugs, we can not find driver bugs for hardware we do not have access to before it gets in the hands of customers.
iWorkThere (if you really do):
1. this device has been on the market for almost a year
2. this device ran Vista fine, it’s SP1 that causes the BSODs
3. instead of complaining that Fujitsu won’t provide units to MS, why don’t they BUY them. Can’t MS afford them?
4. consumers have a right to expect any OS to be stable once it ships, no matter the hardware. Especially hardware that was properly designated as “Vista capable” according to MS guidelines
5. maybe MS should quit allowing Vista to ship on hardware that is not capable of providing a proper operation experience, ya think?
James,
I didn’t realize the Vista SP1 was available for consumers! You are speaking about a retail SP, right?
let me get this straight. you install a WAY beta SERVICE PACK for vista and bitch about stability? i purchased a 1610 in december A GOOD DEAL in part because of your reviews. The 1610 is a trainwreck and to blame vista is a cop out. the drivers suck and vista drivers were clearly an afterthought from day one. the device is pathetically underpowered and to blame vista as bloated is pathetic. IS IT SO HARD FOR THESE MANUFACTURERS TO ACCOMMODATE 2GB OF RAM? its 2007 people get real 1gb is useless now. all the umpcs on the market are a wate unless they can accommodate vista and to actually tell people to go back to xp instead of letting the hardwre vendors off the hook for antiquated designs is a joke. hindsight IS 20/20 and the hardware will always catch up. i cant wait for my 2710p to arrive do i can dump the 1610.
In James case, it’s a combination of issues that just doesn’t work well with Vista.
* Max 1GB RAM with microDIMM’s
* Late Vista drivers
* 4200 RPM hard drive. The hard drive seems to be the main bottleneck with Vista. Where’s the emphasis of hybrid hard drives being a requirement to be a stamp of approval for Vista Premium.. After some time now, we still haven’t seen any. ReadyDrive? No mention of that in the blogosphere and I’m not even talking about ReadyBoost.
* Chipset. It usually takes the next generation of Intel/VIA chipsets to be optimized for the next version of Windows.
Besides these issues, IMO, Vista is a bloated piece of crap. There’s a lot of processes in the background running we don’t know what the hell they are doing. For portable/mobile devices, it’s better to be as efficient as possbile.
Going back to XP, it’s doable with 1GB RAM. Going with Linux, it’s doable with 512KB of RAM.
I personally want to thank Microsoft for releasing Windows Vista. After running XP Media Center Edition on my Dell M1210 Core 2 Duo laptop with 1GB of RAM, I received my free upgrade to Vista. Within days of its install, I was so fed up with the OS’ lackluster performance and stability that made me flash-forward things to come for Windows-based PCs, that I immediately Craigslist’ed my notebook and bought a MacBook. Stability issues and remarkable performance with the same specs as my previous M1210, I never looked back again. Thanks to Microsoft, I am now a proud Mac owner. Don’t worry, I’ve Boot Camp’ed your copy of XP but I’ve yet to boot that side more than once every three or four weeks.
It’s a bit unfair to compare the performance of a fresh XP install to a laptop that’s been running Vista for almost a year. Also, don’t forget that when you get a new P1610 from FS it has so much crapware on it that it runs a lot worse with XP than Vista – mine took about 5 minutes just to boot when I first got it and this wasn’t rectified until I installed Vista on it. Now my P1610 runs acceptably fast with Vista although I have tweaked it (and I can understand that some people don’t want to have to do that) but hopefully the final version of SP1 will improve performance even more.
I’m going to second Jake’s point here. The truth is that unless you want a $3000+ Flybook v5i, the p1610 is the only option for some people (those who want a usable convertible tablet at around 2lbs). That said, when mine came with Vista preinstalled I was leery and quite disappointed by the performance. While I shouldn’t have had to go through the tweaking process (and lose eye candy), the post-tweak Vista runs very nicely on the p1610. The tablet improvements to Vista make it well worth the trouble, IMHO.
@IWorkThere
If you do ‘work there’ I suggest that Microsoft invest in a Fujitsu U1010 or U810 running Vista and experience the wonders of your OS running on the machine. It’s NOT pretty and NOT a good advertisement for MS either. Perhaps you need to seriously rethink your OS approach to the UMPC/micro-PC market. That’s all I’m asking. ( together with a copy of XP Tablet OS so I can get my ‘paperweight’ working….)
@jamie poster, I’m with you. I think tablet users especially are stuck between a rock and a hard place with this mess because of the improvements in the handwriting recognition in Vista. That’s really the only thing that pushes me to Vista from XP, as I did have frustrations with that w/my Toshiba M205.
If I didn’t really want a Tablet, I’d be all over a Macbook myself, but I *do* want a Tablet :-(.
So James, are you going to roll your 2710p back to XP as soon as it arrives?
@JohnC: To be honest, I wouldn’t even bother running XP on a device as underpowered as the latest batch of UMPCs (or the previous generation for that matter which is why I never bought one). An 800Mhz processor is just a joke and although I’m sure Microsoft had a hand in the development of the specs for UMPC v2 I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame Vista if it doesn’t run well on that hardware. Why are the OEMs designing such underpowered machines and why are people buying them when they clearly aren’t capable of running modern software.
The fact is that there’s only ever going to be small percentage of users trying to run software like Vista, Office 2007, etc. on such slow processors so it’s a bit much to expect software vendors to cut back on features that require beefier hardware.
Having said that, I think Microsoft should be a bit more careful about what they allow OEMs to install Windows on. Sure, they get to sell a license and make some money but I think they would end up with a better reputation if they just said no to selling Windows on something like the U1010.
@Jake
Yes, I agree that the hardware is partially to blame. However, I entirely disagree with your comments about running XP on such devices. I’ve been using a Sony UX280 with XP for almost a year and the performance of that combination is fine. I was NEVER going to install Vista on it! I’d never want to go back to a clunky laptop now for my portable requirements. The promotion of Vista for these devices is a mistake given the current hardware available. Fujitsu is equally to blame for not being able to source me a U1010 with XP which is the device I’d specified for the given application. If you want the hardware, it seems that you have to source it in a ‘broken’ form and then ‘fix’ it. This is a ridiculous way of having to do business in the 21st century.
1) I work there and have for over 15 yrs.
2) Other than class drivers, Windows teams do not write device drivers. Those come from IHVs. Are there “inbox drivers” yes, but even the video drivers come from companies like AMD/NVIDA – Microsoft does not build drivers for 3rd party hardware. This also means that the Windows group does not write drivers for Microsoft Hardware products. Those drivers come from the those product teams.
3) There are plenty of background services and I have yet to find the white board anyone’s office that outlines them all.
4) UMPCs are not laptops you can get a good idea how good they will be running Vista when you look at the processor in them. VIA is not a powerhouse but you do get good battery life.
Group hug, take care & brush your hair
I accept that the drivers aren’t a MS issue but promoting Vista on microPCs IS given their inherant hardware limitations.
I guess I could upgrade the RAM on the U1010 to 2GB but I’d then invalidate the warranty. Anybody know the details of HOW?
Fujitsu customer support now working on ‘Downgrading’ me from Vista. At this stage, any move from Vista on the U1010 is an UPGRADE in my opinion.
Please don’t over simply the problem when it comes to drivers. To understand it, let’s roll play (oh fun)
You make the end hardware package
1) Microsoft pulls you in early to tell you about the plans for the next great version of Windows but binds you to not telling anyone else anything
2) You make try to make your products on-par with everyone else so you add the hardware others have to generate a common baseline for the price point range a system sells for
3) You try to take a step-forward and build in something no one else has, but with blinders on you don’t seem to realize that everyone else is doing the same thing and came up with the same idea of what “their customers are demanding”
4) As the OS development marches along you start to get your systems build and in testing, but you don’t have updated drivers/applets from your suppliers
5) Trying to push your suppliers to get their products working when they do not seem to have access to software builds as quickly as you do
You make the devices sold to the system maker
1) If you sell directly to a major name brand OEM or even ODM you make little revenue and you turn things around by selling in volume
2) You make drivers that work on the last OS Microsoft made, and even dabble let/force your firmware blokes with making some systray software (ala crapplets) to show off the functionality that sets you apart from all of your competitors so you can make a few more cents per device
3) Microsoft keeps forgetting to ask you to take part in betas of the next OS so you don’t get a chance to test early on
4) You sure don’t have time to go find where Microsoft got around to posting the drafts documents on how things will change on MSDN
5) Since you do not know what is changing you wait until someone tells you to update the software to work on the next OS
5.1) If you are smart, your contract with your customers does not include software updates, so you wait until your customer pays you to update software (who the f#ck wants to develop software for free?)
6) You have to argue with Microsoft that the hardware worked in the past, and now that it does not work it must be a bug in the OS right? What? No, the software shipped bugchecks under stress testing? F#ck that – it worked, Microsoft changed something.
You are Microsoft
1) You know the OS, you know the basics of hardware, you want to write software
2) Forget trying to convince anyone with the title of better than director to let you spend time writing drivers for hardware unless it is a class driver
3) You can try to write a class driver, but the purpose of that is to commoditize that hardware, stripping what makes hardware unique into something generic (think VGA driver vs. CrossFire/SLI driver)
4) You run in to problems with hardware but cannot reverse the hardware to get the driver to work
5) Based on agreements with government bodies everyone has to be treated the same – if you talk to one video card maker, you need to talk to ALL video card makers. You cannot say “let’s focus on the top three cards” that’s against rules.
6) So you noodle around the rules, check with the LCA team and have try this route “let’s focus on the top three companies and let them choose the cards to support” then they can supply the driver and put it on the DVD or up on Windows Update if it passes the hardware tests
7) Based on resources you cannot expand the process to cover all hardware so you pick key components that are needed to boot up the system and leave the rest to fend for themselves.
8) For the folks you have on campus you drive them to build standard, stable drivers not to trick out the driver that exploits their hardware for in box. That is why the hardware vendors have their own websites
9) For the companies that are not on campus see the other points
This is also an oversimplification of a complex problem but just to blame Microsoft as the source of the solution, or the problem is also an oversimplification
Group hug
@IWorkThere
Thanks for an insightful post! Yes, I can appreciate how hard it is`to keep device, machine, software and OS development ‘in sync’. MicroPCs/UMPCs provide another challenge for software and OS development. They just can’t be as powerful as the latest desktop server yet they need to be as compatible as possible with that type of machine to allow commonality of files and as much software as possible. The launch of a new OS complicates the situation considerably.
Hint: Since MS is planning to continue support for XP anyway (for budget hardware in the third world particularly I hear), why don’t you target XP to the microPC/UMPC hardware segment OEMs for now, at least until UMPCs/MIDs are able to run Vista properly? With registry tweaks you can even make XP LOOK LIKE Vista minus the Aero experience. Build in a bit of forward compatibility and everyone would be happy. Just an idea…..
Best Regards from a concerned user.
XP “works” so the idea of adding features to the OS would put the stability at risk and if there was time the WEX team was going to spend on changes it should be on something that you can get $ back from customers for the testing required to keep it stable. Microsoft charges for the OS and gives the service packs.
We could take the Apple tact and release an update every 18 ~ 24 months and charge for it. Mhhmm….
Well,you’ve already got a very popular operating system that you’re planning to support anyway. I’m sure some folks would sooner go with the ‘tried and trusted’ rather than the ‘new and unproven’. It happens to work better than Vista on some of the current lower powered platforms..
To end the story, Fujitsu delivered the XP and dedicated Driver discs this evening. They installed like a dream and now the U1010 FLIES! I won’t be going back to Vista anytime soon for this type of machine. I also won’t accept a UMPC without XP installed or the installation discs included for the time being.
XP 2 Vista 0…..