[tlug] Re: Why Vista Sucks (was: linux: it's becoming ubiquitous)

[scott <scott@example.com>]

On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 16:02 +0900, Josh Glover wrote:

> For an interesting opinion on why Vista be the way it be, enter Joel Spolsky:
> 
> http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
> 

I read an interesting report on vista a while back (can't find the URL
right now), mostly about how horrid the performance was due to the
internal encryption between all hardware devices in order to protect
intellectual property of bluray or HD DVD disks from would be crackers
and reverse-engineers (IIRC). The thinking was that, sure, it's a huge
performance hit but we'll just pass that on to the end user and force
them to pay for more RAM. The manufacturers will love us. Externalize
the cost to the end user cause what alternative do they have? (Well I
can think of a few...)

 Of course, there are tons of issues with vista, not just the tendency
for it to crash all the time. Mostly for me though, it's that the
performance is absolutely terrible. The place I work at recently
purchased a bunch of laptops from Toshiba that came preloaded with vista
superduper edition- 1G Ram per box. Upon boot, with no other processes
running, antivirus or anything, vista alone was using something like
75-80% of system resources. Incredible. I contacted Toshiba about
drivers for XP as most of the users in the office were complaining about
vista, and believe it or not Toshiba Japan said they would not even
support XP on this new model- kind of forcing us to choke on vista.
Luckily I found the drivers on the Toshiba Australia website and was
able to set up an XP image, but believe you me, everyone wanted it off
their laptop. Unstable, slow, and what is the genuine advantage of that?

I'm still passing off copies of Knoppix and Kubuntu live CDs to people
that come to me with infected machines (mostly due to p2p filesharing
viruses), and recently I installed Knoppix onto a usbstick for even more
fun when helping recover files from crashed/infected XP systems. Also, I
use Linux all the time to reset XP administrator passwords, do network
traffic analysis on our local LAN and WAN routers, and even for ghosting
laptop images. It goes without saying, without the power of the penguin,
my job would really suck...

</rant>

Cheers,
Scott VanDusen
Tokyo