FastCheck

[eric_thiebaut]

Hi,

For all of you who might be interested, here's my review of my adventures with Windows Vista...
I was part of the official Windows Vista beta program, and submitted a few bugs to MS. This got me a free version of Windows Vista Ultimate .So I went away and installed it on my laptop (I don't have access to my desktops at the moment as I've just moved back to Ireland and my stuff is still in storage somewhere...).

Configuration: HP TC4200 Tablet-PC laptop, 1GM RAM, 60GB disk, Intel 915 chipset, Pentium M 2.0 GHZ.

First, bad news: The Intel 915 chipset is not supported by Aero Glass, so I had to use the basic look, which doesn't look half as good. This also means that Vista uses more system RAM for handling graphics as my "video card" doesn't have any memory. But the nice surprise was hardware support: all my hardware worked out of the box, including my cheap $5 ebay-bought webcam from Hong-Kong.
Another great surprise was that HP provided all required drivers for Vista, and a Vista-compatible version of all their software. Congrats to HP for providing such an extensive support for an old-ish (1.5 years) laptop! They even provide tools such as their credential managers. Too bad it requires TPM now, though. I really didn't want to enable it in the BIOS and therefore couldn't use the credential manager. The XP version doesn't require it, why should this one?
The only hardware issue I have is that the stylus (pen used to write on the screen or replace the mouse) stops working once I put the computer into sleep. If I want to use it, I need to reboot the computer... I had raised the bug with MS and the bug has moved several times from open to closed, and back to open. Last news is, it's closed now - but I still haven't seen a patch anywhere...

On the software side, great too: all my applications worked without any problem. I didn't try anything clever or out of the ordinary, but surely I didn't have any issue whatsoever. Only issue with FastCheck: if you want to click on "Set as default email account" in the account box, you have to run FastCheck as administrator... Once it's done though, you can close it and reopen it as usual with limited rights. FastCheck does give you a sensible error message box though, so I'm quite happy with myself to have anticipated this problem .

Now for my general impressions:

Vista needs a *lot* of memory. Clearly, 1 GB is not enough. After my experience, I would not install it on a computer with less than 1.5 GB, probably even 2. Switching applications (ALT+TAB) is dreadfuly slow, displaying minimised applications is very slow too... I have the feeling that this is enhanced by the fact that I use the Basic theme and that I do not have extra video memory. Maybe 1 GB is enough if you have a 256 MB video card?
There also seems to be some leaks: Firefox usually eats about 350 megs after a few hours of average use!!! As I copied my XP Firefox profile (and as I'm testing it now again on XP), I can tell you that the same profile would usually use about 70-80 MB of RAM!

Vista is also extremely disk intensive. Your disk with almost always be on and going at about 20% or more. You can really hear it going on permanently. Vista has added some new disk IO priorities (yepee!), much like previous versions of Windows NT+ did for the CPU, but from experience this did not help at all. Disk access was always extremely sluggish and indeed really painful.
That brings you to the terrible Windows Explorer Copy/Move/Delete bug. This bug has been documented in several locations on the web. Microsoft has a cryptic patch, but this seems limited to interactions with remote servers. My experience shows that this happens on local drives. Basically, most file operations in the explorer, are *really* slow. I meant, really, really, slow. Talk about 2 minutes to delete one file! The file was 1GB, but come on, I'm just talking about a simple operation that is instant on XP! And when you try to copy/paste files, it will stay stuck for minutes or more trying to figure out how much time it will take to copy or delete the file (usually: 10 seconds!). There seems to be a problem with their algorithm by the way: 2GB at 16MB per second will not take 10 days!
Given the massive disk impact, I disabled search (great for File/Run and help, pretty useless for documents), superfetch and everything else I could find. Things went much better but were still sluggish.
And after 2 weeks of this hammering, Windows happily told me that I had hardware errors on my disk . I can't believe I had no issue with XP in 1.5 years and that 2 weeks of Vista killed a sector .
So I'm quite disappointed with the new Windows Vista caching, and especially with superfetch. I don't care if it uses more memory, even if it uses all my system memory without any app launched, but it has to use it for the great of goods and make things faster. Well that hasn't been my experience and I found I was much better of with superfetch disabled.
My laptop has a slow 5400RPM disk. I would definitely not recommend running Vista on a slow disk like this. I would really recommend a 7200RPM. Even better, get a RAID combination. RAID-1 (mirroring) would probably be a good solution as it provides fast reads (there'll be a lot of them, trust Vista on that!) and also provides data security (I wouldn't have lost that file... Good that I religiously back up everything!).

I also tried readyboost with a 256 MB USB key. That didn't seem to make any difference at all. To be fair to Microsoft, I'm pretty sure they've implemented this with the USB keys of 2010 in mind. In a couple of years' time, we should be able to get USB keys whose speed will turn close to the practical limit of 33MB/s that USB2 provides. This is much more that most USB keys provide. I'm pretty sure that they'll even use the same technology (and ReadyDrive) with internal "disks" too, so it will be a cheap way to add memory to a system currently locked to 4GB.

UAC wasn't as bad as I was expecting it though. After installing all required apps, I hardly ever got an UAC window at all. You just have to change a bit the way you work, but it's not as bad as I first thought (it's a real pain when first setting up the machine though), But I do think that Microsoft has gone plain wrong with it though: they've created the same problem that all firewall software solutions have created: they delegate "security" onto the user by popping up questions. The fact that most security applications work this way doesn't make it the right thing to do! I wouldn't want to see my mother's (or grandmother's!) face when asked if the started the "File Operation" and really really want to continue with it, when the default is cancel! Surely they could have presented that in a better way. That also looks to me like a lawyer's thing: "well, you told Windows you really wanted to do it so it's not our (MS) fault if your computer is now compromised!".

With regards to CPU-responsiveness, I found Vista better than XP. All sluggishness looked like they were related to memory or disk issues. That put aside, I didn't get any hang, mouse movement was way more fluid that on XP (where it often freezes during high IO or CPU activity), so 1 point for that!

Also, with regards to stability, I really found Vista rock solid. I pretty much never rebooted it as I only ever put it into sleep mode. I did not get any blue screen. Only stability issue I found was that the tray bar was leaking GUI handles like there was no tomorrow and that after 9999 handles it could not repaint menus... Killing and restarting explorer.exe usually solved the problem, but not always.

The new Vista Ultimate applications are really good. Games look great (they really needed an overall!), and included applications are great. Too bad a lot of them require a WDDM card and that without it you'll lose most of the best applications. Photo Gallery and DVD maker are two great examples. Media Center is OK, but nothing to write home about. I found it completely unusable with the trackpad as the scrolling menus keep scrolling and almost never stop. Clicking on the right menu is just a question of pure luck.

Windows Ultimate Extra, so far, have been a bit lame. Let's see what the future brings us...

And last, I wasn't too impressed with video playback. For a software that's aimed at multimedia, I found playing AVIs a bit jittery at times...


So my conclusion:

* Don't bother with the Basic edition - Aero Glass is not just plain candy, it actually gives you much more than that. Before installing it on my laptop, I tried Vista on a more powerful machine with a WDDM-supported video card and the responsiveness is just so much better. You also get a tear-free GUI (no need to repaint background windows when you move a foreground window as all windows are just "layers" and displaying is handle by the video card).

* For the same reason, don't bother if you don't have a WDDM-certified video card. Everything will be much more sluggish!

* Don't bother if you don't have 1.5GB or RAM. Actually, make it 2. I have 2 main computers, one with a dual Xeon with 1.5 GB of RAM and another one with 2GB and a dual core AMD CPU. I'll probably upgrade the latter but not the former.

* Don't think adding a 1GB USB key will magically turn a 512MB machine into a 1.5GB machine. In my experience (adding 256MB to a 1GB machine), I could not spot the difference. If in any doubt, refer to the previous statement!

* Get a *fast* disk. Even better, use a RAID-1 or RAID-10 disk array. On my XP box, I use RAID-0, however I cannot recommend it on Vista due to the very high disk activity and the lost sector in 2 weeks...

* I would seriously consider installing Vista on dual-core or dual-CPU machines only. I think not having a WDDM-compatible video card makes things worse, but for example opening the task manager shows that it takes about 15% of my Pentium M 2.0 GHZ to refresh its own screen at the default rate. This is about 2 to 3 times more than on XP. I think I remember I didn't see as big an impact on a machine with Aero Glass, probably thanks to the desktop composition.

* Check hardware compatibility. In my case, the only issue really was the video chipset. Everything else was supported. But, especially on laptops, you should really double check before you buy.


As a general conclusion, I think Vista is a great system for high-end machines, and will scale extremely well (better than XP) as hardware goes faster. Its new features (I'm talking especially about the new kernel features like IO priorities, improved caching, bitlocker encryption, ReadyBoost...) will really make sense with fast hardware and even more as more hardware like Solid-state disks and hybrid disks become common in the next few years.

So what did I do with my laptop? Well after 1 month I decided to move back to Windows XP. I re-loaded the image I created just before installing Vista and recovered my complete configuration in under an hour. I now feel like I have a brand new PC, blazing fast, very responsive, and much quieter...


Disclaimer: I tried to be as objective as possible, but I've hardly ran any official benchmark took ; I am not interested in these anyway as they are quite artificial and can't really compare 2 OS's as different as XP and Vista. I am usually a MS/Windows advocate, but really after 1 month I couldn't justify the pain of a slow system any longer. I'll try again on a faster machine though, as I still haven't activated my free version of Vista!

Eric

[scarslilpyro]

I might download vista to try it, but I'm still leaning XP, I mean, it takes years to fully understand how to use an operating system.

Microsoft could have gave XP updates, but they wanted money.

[danieljones2006]

I worked on vista for three months and faced a lot of problems.It's networking methodology is very complicated and some of the software are not even able to install,i think this is the worst operating system by micro soft.

Admin edit: removed URL

[techapb12]

vista is pure crap.. xp black still is the best for me

[danieljones2006]

Though Vista is nothing great but Windows 7 is worthy. XP rocks all the time.

[danieljones2006]

I have used it and i don't like it. Although it can handle more pages than XP but i switched back to XP as it is fast and very user friendly. I think its the best OS till date
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