(My) Vista is slow…
So in march I bought a Pavilion TX1030ea laptop from HP, I was intrigued by the tablet form factor and it was reasonably priced with due to a passive touch screen system. The use in tablet mode is very useful while traveling and reading on the sofa, not much of use for “inking” because the screen isn’t very responsive to the touch. But it’s ok, I knew it wasn’t a “real tablet” from the reviews I read before buying it. I also knew that the battery didn’t have much juice (both the small and the additional (included) larger one) but well… it’s a “fun” not a business laptop so I won’t complain too much.
My real complaint is Vista. I did by the laptop looking forward to experiencing the new OS. I expected it not being perfect just as it happened to XP on it’s first release, but from “imperfect” to barely usable… well it’s a little different, isn’t it?
The “not usable” comes from the terrible slowness of the system. The hardware sports Nvidia graphics card, 2x Turion 64 processor and 1 Gig of RAM (that I updated almost immediately to 2, unfortunately without it increasing things very much).
I had complained previously that it took a long time to shut down (the post is here, in Italian only, sorry) and the point I was debating was a post on the official Vista blog were they said “The Windows Vista power management goals were simple: 1) making turning a computer “off”/”on” as reliable, simple, and fast as turning off/on a TV.
Matters there have improved, if the system has not been used long, but start-up is excruciatingly slow, almost 5 minutes before the system has loaded up all it needs to work and it’s fully usable (and I don’t consider Ok the fact that My Computer needs 30 seconds before displaying all the system’s content: 1 HD, 1 CD Rom drive, no network shares, now external disks).
To demonstrate my point I shot a short video about while starting up the laptop, here it is:
I’ve tried disabling aero (and defragmenting and any other conceivable maintenance operation), so, please, don’t suggest it as it makes no difference really. Even Vista SP1 RC1 doesn’t help.Finally here is a 40 second video displaying the shut down procedure (and olso the opening and closing fo My Documents and My Computer)
) where Doctorow starts examining the differences between the future imagined by science fiction writers and that envisioned by sci-fi film and TV series authors. As examples he cites Asimov, Star Wars and Star Trek among others. His considerations on the subject are quite interesting but the best part comes later, when he discusses several aspects that have much more to do with the present than with the future. A must listen so that you can then judge by yourself.
