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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