"Anyone else remember when Microsoft used to talk about making Windows Vista (or Longhorn, as it was then known) a fast-booting operating system. Fast, as in cold boots that were 50 percent faster than those possible with Windows XP? Something obviously went awry. As Computerworld is reporting, a number of Vista users are none too happy about Vista boot-up times. Some are questioning whether Microsoft is advocating that users just put Vista into sleep mode, as opposed to shutting down systems on a daily basis, to mask the sluggish boot up."
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Member since:2005-11-18
As always Vista boot times will vary by HW. Mostly I think it has to do with the drivers . If you're using all the default Vista drivers included with the OS you'll probably get better boot times than with downloaded 3rd party drivers, especially legacy drivers.
So once you throw in crufty HP printer drivers, ATI video drivers, Creative audio drivers, and random USB devices you'll probably see boot times go up.
Edited 2007-04-11 20:20
Member since:2006-03-06
Agreed, but on the system in question, I stuck with the standard Vista drivers. I wanted to take it for a spin "as is" out of the box and use only what Microsoft provided (IE7, Windows Mail, etc.) to see what my experience would be like. It was, after all, hyped by Microsoft as by far their best OS ever.
I did a clean install of Vista Business (gotta love that Action Pack subscription the company has). Overall, other than UAC being annoying (which I expected, ymmv) and a blue screen (when I was trying to install a CD burning app because the native CD burning just didn't work on my system) I found it to be a reasonably solid but extremely resource-hungry system. I worked exclusively with Vista for two weeks and didn't have a whole lot of major problems.
After the two weeks I went back to my linux installs because I personally am more productive using them. I will perhaps revisit Vista when some of its growing pains have gone away, but I will not personally purchase it because I do not approve of Microsoft's business practices and do not want to give them my financial support (it does not bother some people, and hey - more power to them; doesn't bother me).
Member since:2007-03-26
It's not what that many Vista systems are running on though. Just take a look through PC World* at their budget systems (be it laptop of desktop). All have Vista on and all grossly underspeced for the bloated OS.
* I'm sure most over high-street IT / electrical store are the same.
Member since:2006-03-06
Member since:
2006-03-06
Core duos actually *are* pretty fast machines, actually, but since that is what many Vista systems are running on, that is irrelevant for the topic (should I mod myself down for going off topic?).
I suspect that many of these complaints are due to underspecced systems (the Best Buy near here seems to really enjoy giving users 512Mb of memory, even on Vista systems).
Having said that, on my test system at work, the boot time for Vista is actually twice that of XP on the same exact hardware. There is no indication of any problems in device manager, the system logs, etc. By the way, the system rates a 2.8 (I think; it's been a while since I ran the thing) on Microsoft's performance meter.