Re: A week with Vista as the primary OS

On Jun 8, 11:35 pm, ZnU <z...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <0qkl44pf9qsmraj70vpgdaefssvfn4q...@xxxxxxx>,



 tom_e...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Well, it was about 2 weeks ago that I moved everything over to the
Vista SP1 laptop from the Dell running XP.  All-in-all a smooth
transition.

All of the software from the Dell is up and running.  Several minor
utilities needed for XP are no longer needed with Vista.

My Windows 3.1 language cross reference program even works flawlessly.
After adding the second gig of ram the Vista OS is faster than XP was
with one gig.  Not just a little faster either, the difference is
significant.  The Dell had a 2.8 ghz P4 and the laptop has a 2x1.5 ghz
AMD.  Both have similar video systems too, so other than the ram the
speed difference is a mystery.

The significant only issue so far is that the external USB keyboard
will not start up from sleep mode with out unplugging/replugging.  All
other USB devices are fine, it's just the keyboard.

I've been playing with Vista a bit in BootCamp on my MacBook Pro. It
works pretty well. Ironically, Apple appears to make it easier to find
the right Windows drivers for you hardware than does, for instance, Dell.

Even with Vista, though, it looks like Windows hardware management isn't
quite up to Mac standards. I'd initially installed without external
peripherals hooked up to the machine. At work, I tried booting up Vista
with my external screen connected (a Dell 2408WFP, a great screen),
which has an internal USB hub, to which I had connected an external
keyboard, a mouse, and an iPhone. Right after booting up everything
worked fine... but then the system popped up its little "Detecting
hardware" message, and started going through and finding the hub and the
other devices, and once it started doing that, the external mouse and
keyboard went dead for three or four minutes until it finished, when
they eventually started working again.

On the Mac side, of course, you'd never have this. Everything is just
detected in the background. The computer doesn't harass you about it,
devices are detected in seconds, and things don't stop working while the
computer thinks about what to do with them.

Vista in general seems rather chatty... the system goes so far as to pop
up a message when it detects you've plugged something into the machine's
headphone jack. It's almost like Microsoft worked so hard to get Windows
to properly detect hardware that they want you to notice every time it
does so, so you can be proud of it. Apple, on the other hand, just takes
this stuff for granted.

--
"No one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have." -McCain in April

"I disagreed strongly with the Bush administration's mismanagement of the war
in Iraq." -McCain in June

Plug and Play on Windows is just generally a pain-in-the-ass. If
devices are plugged in on startup, everything works smoothly and
nicely, but as you said, plugging things into the system after the
system's up causes that "Found New Hardware" crap that takes ages. On
top of that, it keeps some sort of stupid device list in the registry
that seems to cause more issues than it helps. Plug an external disk
into a different USB port? Windows sees it as new hardware.
Sometimes it'll even go as far as appending #2 or something similarly
stupid to the device's name in Device Manager. Get a new, identical
device to replace a broken one? Windows is gonna call it #2, dammit!
Is there an easy way to get rid of the now defunct device that Windows
still remembers? Nope. When the drivers exist to be loaded for plug
and play, OS X and Linux have got Windows beat for dynamic driver
loading.
.

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