The Yawn Is Born

Yesterday I went to set up and configure a new Dell laptop for a client which had Vista Home Basic installed on it. It was an Inspiron 1501 laptop which cost £350, with 500Mb RAM and an 80Gb HDD.

Last week I went to set up another identical laptop which was supplied with Windows XP Home preinstalled, otherwise exactly the same spec all-round.

Whereas the laptop with XP Home was quick and responsive out of the box, even before I had "Decrapified" it, the Vista one was glacial by comparison, to an unbelievable degree. After the initial start-up sequence where users and other things were set up, there was a wait of around 5 minutes while I was left looking at a nice graded blue screen with nothing on it, wondering what was happening. If the HDD light hadn't been flickering all the time, I'd have thought that the laptop had locked up, but eventually it did slowly crawl back to life as the start-up sequence carried on.

The "user experience" with the Vista laptop continued in this way even after the initial start-up sequence had finished. For example, I had to set up printing to a shared printer, so I went to the menu and clicked on "Control Panel". Then waited while a Control Panel window opened and a green progress bar slowly edged its way across the top of the window for a minute or two before the contents of Control Panel were shown. Opening it a second time took just as long, so it wasn't simply doing a first-time set-up of the applets that I could ascertain.

Maybe it was something to do with the 87 processes what were running on the unmodified out-of-the-box system that slowed it down so much. Although why Dell pre-install Google Desktop Search on a Vista laptop which purportedly has excellent built-in searching is anyone's guess.

I was extremely underwhelmed and this wasn't even a version of Vista which supports the Aero interface. Take one perfectly usable laptop running XP, upgrade the OS to Vista and then use the laptop as a paperweight as it's unfit for anything else.

The Wow Starts Now? All I can say is "The Yawn is Born".

How much will Microsoft refund if the user decides to upgrade back to XP Home, I wonder? Which will probably happen some time next week if I'm correct.