Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Monday 11 August 2008, 7:26 AM
... But Still a Few Things Amiss (with Vista)
Anyway, the point of this is not so much the BSOD, sadly we have come to expect those from Windows, although XP had gotten much better about it, now Vista seems to be regressing in that area again. The real point of this post is that I had said last week that I could clearly see the benefit of the Intel TurboMemory when I used suspend and resume, as the computer came back on in less than 5 seconds. Well, since that BSOD, that is no longer the case. It now takes a good 30 seconds to resume after suspending. Sigh.
When the crash happened, on the next boot I got a message that said something like "Improper Shutdown Detected...", and then a counter ran rather slowly from 0% to 100% before it finally booted up. I don't know if that had anything to do with the TurboMemory or not; it didn't look like the old scandisk check that used to run after improper shutdowns, at any rate.
I hope this doesn't become a habit....
jw 11/8/2008
PreviousComments on this post
After reading a few articles on SP1 and some of vista updates, I decided to make my Toshiba a dual boot with vista. I started at 10:05 on Wed. and it is now Friday, and I just got vista back on last night around 11:30 pm. Still have to resize the win partition and decide which distro I want to put on the backside of vista. I haven't fully checked out vista with SP1 yet, but have noticed it boots up faster. Have to get rid of all the Toshiba crapware also. I have minute to minute account of how I did it and how long it took to do each item, and was amazed at how impatient I have gotten since switching to Linux.
Amen to that! I was going to mention the amount of time that it took in my original post, but decided that I had said that several times already. I'm glad to hear that someone else had the same experience.
When I reloaded Vista on this S6510, and went through all the updates, and SP1, and more updates... even before starting to install the utilities and applications that I use, I had been at it for nearly a full day! Add the time for configuration and supplemental installation, and you've got two days of work on your hands.
Compare that to loading Linux from scratch, which is certainly less than an hour's work to get the base installation done and install updates. Even when you add configuring and installing utilities and applications, and custom software, you can easily be done in half a day.
Thanks for reading and commenting, as always. I'm always interested and glad to hear what you have to say.
jw 15/8/2008
After 2days and 4 hours I now have a dual boot laptop with vista and PCLinuxOS Gnome.I started the Linux install @ 13:08, was finished @ 13:17
Rebooted into vista and used easyBCD to add Linux to vista's boot loader and was using Linux at 13:23. There are a few games and utilities that I want to download, but there is no rush. I found one good thing about vista though, it comes with it"s own partition resizing tool. Out of 200 gig
it would only give me 80gig for Linux, which is plenty. Now I am going back to vista and remove all the crapware from Toshiba.
I class myself as a pioneer with technologies, ie. I like to try the new and push forward the technological curve - patience is great thing to have on your side - but its difficult to have patience with Vista as it doesn't take me into new territories, expand my capabilities - it only restricts them.
Windows XP SP3 does everything I need and more, its faster, more effiicient with existing hardware- has a mature driver base going back to 2000, so if you want to connect a piece of kit you can generally find a driver.
All this giving 'Vista another chance' was great when I didn't have a system already set up which does everything I want it to, but wasting hours reconfiguring an installation only to find out there isn't a driver or something is less robust than under XP - I really can't see the point, installation for the sake of installation, and a regression not a forward step.
If you want fancy graphics to write a word document buy a Mac - if you want an all round swiss army knife - stick with XP. And if you want an all round swiss army knife for free - try linux, Ubuntu being my preferred installation.
@adamjarvis - I agree with everything you said, and if fact I have said pretty much the same things in my blog. In the comments to a recent post, I also said, if you already have XP installed, and you are happy with it, then don't even consider upgrading to Vista, because it almost certainly doesn't add anything of benefit to you. Likewise, I would be very pleased if everyone (or at least a large proportion of people) would make the plunge to Linux, whether it be Ubuntu, Mandriva or one of the others - and I think that most of them would be quite happy after they did it.
The reason that I made these recent posts about Vista, though, was for people who were buying, or considering buying, new PCs that come preloaded with Vista, to give them some information indicating that Microsoft propaganda aside, my personal experience is that Vista has indeed become more stable and more usable recently. I am still using it as my windows system of choice, when I have to use Windows, so that in itself says quite a lot, compared with my previous experiences with Vista.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw 20/8/2008
Amazing....you guys make it sound soooo complex. It's enough to put your average Joe/ Joanne right off the idea of having anything to do with Vista. But what surprises me even more, is just how much time you all seem to be wasting just dealing with it? Not only do you spend hours dealing with the problems you've encountered but then you engage in discussing those problems here! Isn't that a bit like double-handling?
Oh well, guess that's what this site is really all about?
'Puters!
TFD
