Mary Jo Foley and Windows pet peeves.

re: Mary Jo Foley and Windows pet peeves.

James ONeill — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:01:34 GMT

Thanks Richard.

I had a very bad experience with Nvidia initially - the drivers shipped with RTM were horrible. About 3 months afterwards there was an update and I have had no problems for the last year and a half. My laptop has a SATA disk and has been fine on that front from day one.

I can understand that if a given bit of hardware doesn't work then that can be a deal breaker... though it does rattle my cage a bit when people always blame Microsoft for that. I wish we'd be a bit rougher with OEMs sometimes, although the DoJ might have something to say about that .

re: Mary Jo Foley and Windows pet peeves.

Richard Milner-Watts — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:54:14 GMT

Have to say I don't really care about start up times or power consumption. Until Vista is stable on motherboards with NVidia northbridges and sata controllers it won't re-appear in my home. To be fair the 30 Dell Vista desktops we bought have been fine, but the Vista/NVidia driver story is utterly horrible. (In one afternoon of running Vista at home I had 8 BSOD's, I spent 3 hours trying various solutions I found on the web, and then just gave up and went back to XP).

Just my random 2 pence, a colleague pointed me at your blog for Virtualisation hints and tips.

Cheers,

re: Mary Jo Foley and Windows pet peeves.

James ONeill — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:34:01 GMT

Bryan, my point was that its foolish to worry about the last 5W when you can save that in plenty of other ways. Changing 1 light bulb in will save more.

Vista's sleep means it saves more Power during the day than it wastes by being in sleep overnight. But if you want to save the last 5W then use hibernate, that powers the machine down cold but resume doesn't have to go through all the boot time tasks. Although Saving and reloading 4GB takes a while.

Vista isn't quick to boot, so the advice to is to use sleep. The argument that sleep wastes 5W doesn't stack up because vista's cat-naps during the working day more than cancel that out.

re: Mary Jo Foley and Windows pet peeves.

Bryan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:26:21 GMT

Trying to turn Vista's tardy booting into an argument for the environmental/CO2 reducing benefits of sleep and hibernation modes seems to be missing the point a little! I've got a two year old entry level MacBook and a one month old top end HP/Vista laptop with double the RAM and a 4GB ReadyBoost cache which cost a good deal more. I can boot the Macbook from cold, logon, browse the net and shutdown before the HP/Vista combo will give me a logon prompt and yes, I’ve followed your advice for removing unnecessary start-up apps and services.

On the Vista laptop, I feel I have to strike an unhappy compromise between wasting 5w in sleep mode or wasting mine or my employer’s time while I wait an unreasonable time for it to start up. With the Mac, I’m happy to power down completely because then I know it’ll be using zero watts and I won’t have to wait an unreasonable for it to start up.