I had my first go with Vista today on a new HP laptop at work.
It was the Home Basic version.

Is it really as slow as it felt?
We had 3 Explorer windows open, were reviewing 40 pics in the Image Viewer thingy, and had an Office document open.
Is it just the Home Basic Version? Is the Pro edition ones snappier?

My first impressions, as some of you might have guessed, aren't tempting me away from OS X, and dare I say it, I'm looking at the same CD full of images in Preview, running Photoshop and Safari with 12 tabs open on my old G4 and it still feels snappier.
Poorly set up laptop maybe? I did see a Norton bar in IE.

Norton is Satans rancid testicles when it comes to performance

Yes.

I hope you have learnt your lesson!

My nice new Tosh came with McAffee, which not only made it unusable but was detected by Spybot as "Known Malware" because, to paraphrase, "It f*cks up your PC without your consent"

Now I've gotten rid of it, I'm fairly happy with Vista. I wouldn't want to use it with less than 2GB though.

All I need now is some AV which is usable. Probably going with NOD, since that's the corporate policy.

Random Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9aL3G-HI0s

What sort of PC was it? If it was running Home Basic, then it is probably a very low powered machine, with very little memory... The whole point of Home Basic was that it was "Vista for machines not really capable of running Vista".

It is like saying is OS X that slow? I ran it on a G4 with 256MB RAM...

BTW, the new Norton IS is a lot better and is a very good performer, compared with previous years. It went through a very bad patch over the last decade, but they seem to have finally listened to the criticism... I use it on a daily basis and on my laptop and my desktop, sitting next to an iMac, I don't really notice much difference in performance on normal tasks, or running multiple apps...

I was running the laptop (onboard graphics) with 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 dual head mode, with Word, Excel, Outlook, IE, Firefox (20 tabs), Twhirl and Trillian all running at the same time and it was very responsive...

It is down to hardware specification and whether they have loaded the machine up with crapware...

Edit: Yep, my laptop came with McAfee, it was uninstalled within seconds of receiving it. Now running Symantec corporate AV, will probably be switching to GData or Trend though...

While we haven't stretched it, the Advent lappy is fairly snappy (Vista Home Premium).

We haven't tried anything ultra intensive, but Best Beloved can play his train sim on it with most of the graphics turned on (something we couldn't manage in Parallels on a similarly specced MacBook Pro which arguably has a better GPU).

I know, Dave, I was reluctant to post it, I can only imagine it was poorly set up on underpowered hardware.
I do wonder. It's got to be the answer. Looking at HP's site, the HP 550 Notebook PC (NA948EA) seems to be the likely culprit.
It was a glossy screened HP, about 15" or so. It didn't appear to be running at a terribly high resolution either, so a lot of the real estate that Vista's UI would like to use made it feel quite cramped as well.
I'll have a poke at it tomorrow and see, but I suspect that's the one.
It's one of those things we Mac fans crank out, but yes, this ancient 1.25GHz G4 with 2GB of RAM does feel snappier than that new HP.

The only problem I've seen with Vista is on my Dads PC (Core 2 Duo, I forget which one but I think the clock speed was at least 2.4GHz, with 2GB of RAM). He says he has to leave it for half an hour when he switches it on just so the hard disc stops thrashing and he can actually use it without it being as jerky as hell.

I'm sure it's just my dad. He seems to attract IT problems.

My desktop is fairly loaded with software and needs about 1 minute before everything is loaded.

Same with my Tecra laptop, it needs about 1 minute to synch the directories from my user directory on the domain, then it is perfectly usable. That is about the same amount of time my iMac needs.

Vista will thrash like crazy when it is first installed and then settles down. Also, whilst Norton 2009 is less resource hungry than previous versions, it does insist on doing a startup scan which prevents you from accessing the internet through a wifi connection until it has finished - takes a minute or so.

Trouble is, OEM's have a habit of selling kit that is barely able to cope with XP with Vista installed. Vista has a bit of a performance cliff - it is terrible with less than 2gb RAM, but great with more than 2gb. Vista x64 is awesome with 8gb, but pretty good with 4gb.

Given that Vista HP and upwards defaults to the Vista Basic theme when there is no display driver installed, that may explain why certain desktop activities are a bit sluggish in Home Basic.

I got Vista on day one and my biggest beef has always been with driver compatibility (and availability) and gaming issues. Now, to be fair, I am happy with Vista and the main issue that I had day in, day out- the VERY long startup time- has been solved by leaving the PC hibernating and only rarely and when necessary turning it off.

There is one bizarre aspect that I have yet to solve- the massive delay in the Vista Games menu appearing from the Start Menu. It often takes around five seconds to pop up once I have moved the mouse over "Games" and it isn't just my PC, my laptop is just as bad.

Hmm, I turn off at the main, when not in use, but I haven't had boot time problems, it is usually up and waiting for a password in under a minute and desktop 10-20 seconds later...

A work machine really should have vista business on it.
Home basic means a) the computer can just run vista (low specs) and b) someone bought the cheapest machine they could.

My Vista PC boots in less than 40 seconds (most of that is the hardware & raid controllers kicking in) and is ready seconds after my password is in.

I'll go with that, as it makes sense.



Absolutely, but then it is, as you noted, a works machine. And they've fallen prey to the false economy of buying a cheap machine that's got Vista on it.

Had a slight poke around at it again today so it's not stuck on 800x600 as it was from the factory. Nicer to use now.

Did you build the machine yourself? I get the impression that the slow load times tend to affect 'off the shelf' type systems more.
My Dads one was from Mesh.