Upgrade to Vista! Get an Enema!
OK. My experience with the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system bears a posting, now that i’ve sobered up and gotten over myself….
My daughter covets a laptop - a Mac actually. She is moving into her final year of high school, and is performing very well. She agreed to pay as much as she could from her tax returns from years past, which we’ve managed to catch up with. So we agreed to pay the rest and buy her an entry level laptop - not a Mac. I would love to buy her a Mac but i’m still unable to justify the Steve Jobs tax.
Complicating the situation somewhat was that she has a $177.00 gift card to Best Buy from a returned mp3 player. So we were basically locked into purchasing said laptop from the Best Buy. No problem, i thought, they have laptops and the market being what it is, they’ll be competitive on price. So off we went with Daughter to check out the laptops at Best Buy.
We drifted around a bit checking out the various options. Having coveted the Mac she gravitated to anything “white”. There was a nice looking H-P that was in our price range. It was a 1GB Ram machine with a decent processor (I believe it was Intel Dual core). It was running Vista home premium, which was fine with me. I was actually quite interested in checking it out first hand. We purchased extra warranty, and took the machine home.
Took it home and turned the thing on. First impressions: it looked nice, but seemed to run quite slowly. Daughter wasn’t too concerned however so neither was i. At this point she’s not running long-term weather simulations. When she is i presume that someone else will be providing her with the hardware. Then we tried to get the networking setup. This is where our trouble’s began. I am no Windows networking expert by any stretch but have enough innate ability in that regard to make things work. My home network comprises a linux server for web development, a linux laptop that my wife uses, and an xp machine which i run. I could not get the wireless to work on the new laptop.
Or rather, could not get it to work at any kind of speed. It worked, but at a glacially slow pre-adsl speed. Basically we were back in the Commodore 64 world, waiting for the disk drive to spin it’s way through the program. Plugged in the ethernet and boom, blazing connection speeds, pages loading like lightning, the internet the way you want it. I did the usual things such as looking at message boards, checking out my network configuration, etc. I am running a Linksys wireless-G router and the wireless card on the laptop was a Broadcom something or other. The router supposedly is on the Microsoft will-fly list, and while there were some posts about the Broadcom/Wireless G not playing nice, they weren’t definitive. At least the one’s i took a look at. I upgraded the firmware on the router just in case, but no love.
Now the masochist in me wanted to bang away until i got the stuff to work, but the pragmatist in me said “wait a sec. This is a new machine. Give them a call and see if there’s something obvious….” So i called H-P tech support and was talking to a human in a reasonably short period of time. Now here’s the strange thing. I had barely started telling the techie what the issue was (”slow wireless”) when she interrupted me. “Sir, you do realize that Vista is slow. You should consider more RAM.” Hmmm. A strange thing to be telling someone who just purchased a new machine - one of yours mind you - with 1 GB of ram, a large hard-drive, a decent video card, and a fast-ish processer.
“Wait a minute,” i said, “i’m not complaining at this time about the speed of the machine. I’m telling you that the wireless connection is very slow. Ethernet is blazing, wireless is paint-drying. Let’s look at that issue ok?”
She then proceeded down her check list. We uninstalled the hardware a couple of times, rebooted the machine, tweaked this and that, all to no avail. Ultimately nothing seemed to work. At no time did she ask me about the type of router that i had, which i found strange, because that was the issue as far as i was concerned, and i mentioned this to her.
“Are there issues with the router-wireless combination perhaps?” I told her what we were using, but she wasn’t biting. Her response:
“Sir, you can try it on a new router, or you can send it back to us and we’ll replace the wireless card for you.”
My comment was direct and to the point: “I’m not really interested in purchasing a new router. This one is working fine thank you. And I’m not returning the laptop to you and waiting 6-8 weeks to learn that it still doesn’t work on my network. I’ll simply return it and get my money back.”
Which is what i did. The laptop purchase is on hold. I explained to Daughter that it rarely hurts to postpone a technology purchase: you tend to get more for your money if you wait. In our case we may get a machine that actually works. In the meantime we contemplate the Steve Jobs tax, and consider our options.
The most striking thing about this process was the comment by the H-P techie that “Vista is slow. Perhaps you should buy some more RAM.” In the consumer market i would turn this around: “Vista is slow. Perhaps you should put enough RAM in your machines to compensate.” Not that RAM was in any way the issue in this case….
I also note that Best Buy and Circuit City both reported poor earnings in their recent filings. In both cases they blamed the problem on reduced sales of high-end items, related to the poor housing market in the US and rising interest rates. But maybe, just maybe there were a few Vista-machine returns in those bad figures as well.
