Re: Brand new Vista PC is very slow - disk thrashing due to insufficent memory

"Martin Underwood" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

[...]

Ordering additional memory for the PC that I was mentioning at the
start of this thread took about 20 minutes because of the time for
Crucial's site to advance from one page to another, with continuous
disk thrashing between each page, whereas doing it on my XP laptop
on the same network took about 30 seconds - I did it both ways to
demonstrate to the customer how slow his laptop was!

Someone suggested it could be the OS indexing the disk. I seem to
remember that would cause XP to suck for a while, the first time it
was turned on. Have you eliminated that as a possibility?

(Admittedly, that would show questionable design---surely Microsoft
would want Vista to give a very good impression initially, and to
defer such expensive tasks until later (and anyway, straight after an
initial install, there's nothing interesting to search for).)

[...]

So far I've not seen any killer reasons to get Vista rather than
XP. The Aero screens (which aren't even available on Basic)
certainly aren't reason on their own, however much MS would like to
brainwash us. They are a classic case of style over substance.

But at least it frees you creatively! (Or not:
<http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/pfeiffer_vista/>.)

Selling PCs with 512 MB, when Dell say "Great for...Booting the
Operating System, without running any applications or games", is
just plain WRONG! I hesitate to use the word I really mean in case
Dell get litigious!

It seems quite likely that Dell (and the others) know perfectly well
what the situation is. Perhaps there are direct financial
considerations (OEM XP is perhaps now more expensive than OEM Vista
Basic), and maybe it's just the more indirect one: that Vista is (for
Dell and the like) a good excuse to get people to buy another PC.

I must admit I just don't want it. I have XP, but I think that's the
last one I'll get. Now's a great time to consider a Mac, IMHO. (Or,
of course, GNU/Linux, Open Solaris, etc.)
.