Vista is a “poor quality software” (to put it mildly), but we have no choice but to buy it with the new hardware, like I did when bought my notebook 3 months ago.

After my Desktop died this morning (Motherboard fried) I plugged in my Toshiba m200 to use as my main PC. Without thinking I pressed Return and Vista loaded. I haven’t used it for over a week so you can imagine what happened. After 30 minutes the processor went below 100% and after 45 minutes the hard disk stopped thrashing. That’s with all the tweeks in place! As a test I switched to XP and it was almost instantly usable (there were a few updates needed).

I’ll be sticking with XP on my desktop when I’ve fitted a new motherboard (plus memory, plus graphics card because despite what they say these things are never future-proof).

I have done a little optimizing. I don’t run Sidebar although that’s probably got more to do with the fact that I don’t find it useful. I’ve also turned off a few services for things like Parental Controls that I don’t need. I may have tweaked the power settings a little but that had more to do with getting better life out of my battery (I recently had to fly 24 hours to Australia and wanted the battery to last) than improving performance.

Other than that the secret to my success probably has more to do with keeping my PCs free of too much junk software. I also don’t run antivirus on the P1610 because I found it slows things down too much but antivirus will even slow down XP so that’s not really a negative for Vista. I do think it’s important to do a clean build of your laptop to get rid of any crapware the OEM may have installed. My P1610 originally came with XP and loads of junk. As a result, it took longer to boot into XP than it does Vista.

Other than that, Indexing is running, Superfetch is running, Aero is running and I even have extras services like IIS running.

That’s good news, Jake. Did you do any optimizations or tweaking to get it running so well on your P1610? Also, do you use it in a dock?

Sorry to have to disagree but Vista flies on my P1610 considering the fact that it only has a 1.2 Ghz processor and 1Gb of RAM. It goes to sleep and wakes up instantly, the operating system feels responsive and programs like Word, Outlook Excel 2007 launch instantly. The only application that I run that can take a while to startup is VS.NET 2005 but that’s a bit of a memory pig anyway so I don’t expect too much on an underpowered tablet. I tend to run in the High Performance power setting which may make a difference but I don’t notice much of a difference in the Power Saver setting either.

In regards to the whole Vista = ME thing, this is just nonsense. There’s no way that you could seriously compare the two. I’m running Vista on three PCs now and it is 100% rock solid – something that could never be said about Windows ME.

I recently returned a two week old X61 Tablet. I loved the hardware – thought it was rock sold, lots of intuitive features – extremely well built and solid machine. But, after reinstalling the software twice and still suffering with random BSOD’s related to Vista and/or conflicts with the Turbo Memory – I packed up the machine and sent it back.

Vista, in my opinion, just does not work well, and, despite some great developments with chips, memory and storage, if my operating system doesn’t work right, I can’t justify my computer purchase. I agree with the person who wondered if Vista = Me.

There is nothing about Vista that is anything like any Ferrari. Seriously.

No one in the auto industry ever, ever spoke of any Ferrari product the way people speak of Vista.

How about saying it’s like buying an H3 (also too generous to Vista) and trying to strip it down for racing?

Once again have to agree wholeheartedly with ya. Vista on my P1610 is utterly horrible, and this is after removing superfetch, turning off aero, etc etc. 5 minutes just to standby is utterly ridiculous.

Going back to XP on my 1610 is a huge pleasure. I’m hoping that MS really listens to its customers and provides a true solution in SP1, although we all know that is rarely the case. I just cannot understand how the richest company in the world manages to so constantly be behind the curve?

Nick, could be but Vista was touted often in the pre-launch phase about how much better it was going to be for mobile devices. I was not the only one surprised with the difficulties mobile device owners face once it shipped.

Agree with you 100% about Vista, James….

Have done what you and others have suggested to tweak Vista on my new Kohji SH6 and is much better now….of course the 2GB RAM I put into it probably helped a bit too…

Seems to me if MS was smart they’d release a Vista Mobile edition or a set of options called MobilePC in Control Panel that would give you the right tweaks from the getgo…..

So it goes……

I see your point BUT it isn’t it an inevitable result of one system trying to service portable and heavyweight desktops? To borrow your analogy anyone that buys a Ferrari and is worried about mileage bought the wrong vehicle.

I recently bought a P1610 and chose XP because it better suited my needs on that platform – though i wanted some of the cool bits of Vista.

Maybe we need to go back to different flavours of Windows for different platforms which then brings a different set of challenges. Don’t you hate it when the real world gets in the way.

As a system administrator, I have to disagree with the idea that these are some of Vista’s “best” features. On the contrary, I find some of vista’s biggest features such as indexing and UAC to be very poorly implemented and not well thought out, resulting in very poor efficiency. Many of these features are just extensions of existing services and functions in XP that were expanded on without a full development cycle. The Sidebar is worthless (and by no measure should it consume the resources it does if it was coded by someone with half a brain), and even the new start menu has some critically stupid UI flaws (the scrolling/expanding/jumping “all programs” list being the most annoying).

Most importantly, taking the new set of features of vista as well as the supposed kernel rewrite into consideration, there is no justifiable reason for the jump from a 2 GB base install to 7-11GB, even for the basic versions. That alone makes it obvious that Microsoft wasn’t even seriously considering portable devices during the engineering of vista.

I almost feel Windows Vista is the new Windows ME. Perhaps Vista, like ME, simply serves as a stop gap between Windows XP and the rumored Windows 7 to be released in a few years.

Unfortunately the problem with Vista is not restricted to just older equipment, as Chris’ comment above illustrates. I see the same issues on a Fujitsu P1610 and Lenovo ThinkPad x61, both of which are sold with Vista pre-installed.

File indexing was a problem when I used my Tablet as a second computer; there was a lot of indexing whenever I updated big folders from my main computer. Once I got a dock and used the Tablet as my main computer that problem disappeared.

I turned off UAC for other reasons – many older programs were messed up by it. As an example, even Microsoft’s current version of Process Explorer requires user approval whenever it is run from an Administrator account, making it bothersome to run at startup.

I turned off the Vista sidebar as a frill, and older Tablets won’t run Aero at all.

Now that I’ve fixed the zip file annoyance on Vista (http://annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202), which was also present on XP but less a problem since things I zip like mail now have more constituent files, I find Vista to be about as fast as XP except when copying files, something reportedly being fixed in SP1.

You took the word right out of my mouth, i have just bought a Samsung Q1 Ultra and it was unusable out of the box, i had to reinstall vista then apply most of the tweaks you mention and now its a great device, such a shame really and put me off big time at first