The Windows Vista Experience: Week 2 starts

[cdybedahl]

It is with some wryness we note that "Windows Defender" (Microsoft's anti-spyware thing) at the end of a scan doesn't say that it didn't find anything bad, it says that the machine is running normally.

I'd heard that Vista was supposed to boot faster than earlier Windowses. Maybe it does. Depending on how you measure. It's pretty quick to get to the login screen, and to let you log in (which I can do by fingerprint, in of the genuinely nifty features of this box). It does, however, take fourteen minutes before I can actually do anything. Like read mail, or start Firefox. That's not particularly fast, IMAO.

Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

14 minutes?! It sounds like you have a lot of stuff, or something freakishly slow, running at startup that is bogging it down. I don't think I've ever seen a PC take that long to be useful - even a P2-400 *dog* of a laptop running XP Pro on 128MB RAM.

I've only had limited exposure to Vista, mainly helping other people setup new PCs, but one of the things I noticed was it did start fast and I could get Firefox running in just a couple of minutes from power on - but this was on recent hardware (AMD Turion X2, Core 2 Duo, etc) with 1GB RAM or better.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

This is a laptop with a 1.8GHz Core2 Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM. It says it has a "WIndows Experience Index" of 3.4, if that says anything. Experienced performance on it sucks. Interactive response is worse than on my old 1GHz 768MB iBook G4, and I get about 10 FPS in unpopulated areas in World of Warcraft.

Admittedly, the 14 minutes is pessimistically measured. It's from the moment I pushed the power button until Outlook and Firefox were responding to clicks in less than ten seconds or so.

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the box has a bunch of default crapware starting up or something.

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

Being one of those linux evangelists, I'd be first in line to knock a Microsoft product... but this sounds a lot more like you either don't have current hardware, or nowhere near enough RAM in that thing.

Either that or there are startup items that take a bazillionty and one years to load up and don't free up resources til they're done.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

It's a freshly bought laptop, with two gigabytes of RAM. Vista claims that 1.2GB are in use immediately after boot, so maybe that is on the low side (insane as that would be).

As for startup items, I got it fully installed and haven't added or removed anything. 12 little icons appear on the right side of the taskbar, and I don't know what even half of them are.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

At a guess the icons will include a keyboard driver for your language, windows defender (a little castle), windows security manager (shield), whatever anti-virus program you use, the "start Microsoft Office a little faster" thingy, sound and graphics control thingys, maybe something for the firewall if you're using a separate product, an icon if you have any USB device plugged in, a vertical yellow shield thing if Windows is trying to update, MSN messenger etc., and so forth. Moving the mouse cursor over them without clicking should tell you what they are.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Those I figured out. The mysterious ones seem to have to do with odd bits of hardware, like the trackpad, fingerprint scanner and (for some bizarre reason) the BIOS. Plus one that sort of looks like the Frost Armor icon from WoW, that doesn't show a tooltip and doesn't react to mouse clicks in any detectable way.

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

Is the laptop connected to the internet at startup and does this make any difference? Last time when XP broke on my machine, it started up just as slowly. In my case this was because it couldn't connect to the internet anymore (trouble with the ip-address), but some program that opened on startup made it wait until it was absolutely sure it couldn't connect.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Yes it is, and no it doesn't.

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

14 sounds excessive, and every one of them is a program that loads on boot. The biggest problem with store bought laptops with a pre-installed OS is they install a bunch of crap you probably don't want, and install it with defaults.... and programmers LOVE to have their program start on boot.

The trick is to identify the ones you don't want started at boot time. Office and messengers are good bets to turn off, you can start them manually when you need them.

And yes, 2G of ram is what most geeks consider the minimum when it comes to Vista.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

I have long been fascinated at how many boot screens there are. Over the years, I have crashed on every one.