The Sikh Geek

I took the plunge and upgraded my laptop to Vista Business x64 from Vista Business x86. I didn’t have any major problems with device drivers and even my Samsung SCX 4100 printer has Vista x64 drivers. I’ve had my issues with Vista performance and there is a growing view that this is an issue with Vista. From my personal experience, from using it constantly, since the Beta days I think there is issues. Starting Vista from from a cold boot-up to a point where you login and the OS is ready to use seems like forever and that is not including starting Outlook 2007 and the folders to be updated. One of the performance issues seems to be the Indexer which starts up on boot-up, so can be heavy on disk use. The Vista standard gadgets use quite a bit of CPU, so I just turn those off. There are other apps that slow things down outside of Microsoft such as Anti-virus but you can’t really not have that installed. My laptop is an AMD 64 Tutrion x2 with 2GB RAM and Aero capable ATI Video Driver but even after having upgraded to Vista x64, it still doesn’t feel that I’m really using a powerful machine. I like Vista and wouldn’t go back to anything else but I just hope that with the Vista SP1 release Microsoft will be seriously concentrating on the performance issues. Vista performance improves over time which sounds a bit strange but the indexer gets to a point where it’s done the work so sits in a fairly quiescent state after some time. Also, I use the Sleep mode which allows me to logon much faster and be up and working quite quickly. Vista is a complex operating system but I think the generic problem with Software development is that developers are not optimising their applications as much as they could. It takes a lot of skill to understand the architecture of the hardware and then again to know how to use the compiler to the optimum point.

A couple of strange things on the Vista x64 installation is that it wouldn’t allow me to install the Sharepoint Services 3.0 SDK saying it wasn’t supported on this version of the OS and I couldn’t install Windows Live Writer!!