Vista: First Impressions

StinkPad

Originally uploaded by MikeOliveri.

I’ve now played with Windows Vista on two different machines: one a high-end Dell XPS desktop and the other a built-to-order Lenovo ThinkPad T60. The desktop was running a Core Duo proc with 2GB of RAM and I forget the laptop’s proc spec but it’s got a gigabyte of RAM.

Windows XP would have run smooth as silk on either of these machines. Vista, on the other hand, seems barely able to keep up with them.

Menus take a moment to pop up. Internet Explorer takes its time opening. Booting looks quick, but it still takes quite a while before you can actually start working. I turned off all the extra eye candy on the laptop, and things improved but were still not what you’d expect from a machine with those specs.

In short, Vista’s a pig.

And here I am typing this on a six-year-old Dell Inspiron 8000 with a 700MHz processor and 384MB of RAM running Linux (Fedora Core 5), and it runs just fine.

Hmm…