[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Lyle Bickley]

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 08:31, Robert G. Brown wrote:
--snip--

> My point was that to a computer user -- even a sophisticated and
> somewhat jaded one like me -- the "speed" of a computer has nothing to
> do with its clock, the amount of memory it has, the quality of its
> network, the vast ocean of its disk.  It is measured in very simple
> terms.  When I type, do characters appear "instantly" or after a lag?
> When I move the mouse, does the pointer or view scroll smoothly, or
> jerkily and after a lag?  When I click an execution box, or run a
> program from the command line, does the process execute "now" so that I
> can see the new process hop up on the screen, or is there a 2-3 second
> delay?  When I load a file to work on it, save a file to disk, or do
> ANYTHING AT ALL does it happen NOW or does it happen LATER, after an
> annoying interruption while the system "thinks"?

I couldn't agree more. As an ISV, I attended the Microsoft's first west coast 
Enterprise VISTA training. Subsequently, we implemented VISTA on a 2.6 GHz 
system in our office. We were sure we had done something "wrong" - clicking 
on just about anything - and you'd wait seconds for an action to take place. 
We typically would click again - thinking that somehow we had failed to 
"click" properly - and then (eventually) we'd get two of whatever we 
requested.

We reinstalled - eliminating all the feature "enhancements" we could - and it 
still ran unacceptably slow. We deleted it - and recommended to our IT end 
user clients NOT to implement VISTA until Microsoft did a major rework to 
resolve the outstanding performace issues.

Perhaps with quad core systems VISTA will be "snappy" - Ha! I'll believe it 
when I see it...

Thanks, RJB, for your "VISTA rant" - it raises my hackles, too.

Regards,
Lyle
-- 
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"