Aug 29 2007
Do we need another variant of Vista?
Apologies for the late manner of this post but I have been busy over the bank holiday period.
I read James Kendricks post on the performance issues with Vista a few days ago and it got me thinking about a few things. I have never really suffered any real issues with Vista and I think its far better out of the box than any of the other Microsoft operating system, however the mobile arena are having real problems with UMPC’s and lower powered devices and their frustrations are becoming apprent all accross the blogosphere.
I run Vista Ultimate on a AMD Athlon 3400+, 2GB of RAM and a good quality SATA hard drive and as you would expect things run nice and smoothly. I get the occasional screen flicker at boot and the cold start is around 25 seconds longer than that of XP but not enough to damage my productivity at home.
James said:
“If you use Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-la land where the device fails to resume properly. Sometimes the device comes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful. Other times it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a few seconds. Both of these situations require a hard boot by turning off the power, which not even the OS likes, and then sitting through a boot time even longer than normal. If you call several minutes to boot normal.”
I can see his point, I wouldnt want to sit for two to three minutes while out on the road waiting for my so called ‘mobile’ device to cold boot because it wouldnt resume correctly.
I think one failing of most of the Microsoft operating systems of past and present is each time a new one is released, its bigger and better. By bigger and better I mean contains more features and security systems which take ‘bigger and better’ hardware to run it correctly and make the user experience a pleasant one. Some of this can be avoided by optimising the OS to the hardware on which it runs but by doing this you end up with an Apple Mac type environment where the OS will only run on approved hardware. We could say bye bye to the hundreds and thousands of hardware vendors that don’t get their hardware approved.
In my opinion perhaps Microsoft would be better taking an OS and making it run on the smallest possible processor with a minimum amount of memory taking a minute space on a hard drive but trying to keep as many features as possible. By doing this they could begin to bridge the gap between mobile devices and full fledged devices, you would end up with the same OS at home, work and on your mobile or PDA. You would not be limited because an application works on one but not the other, they could call it Vista Mobile…
…perhaps not but I certainly think for the sake of the ever growing UMPC sector, some consideration should be taken into making Vista run on less.
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