Remember When XP Was Slow?

I forever wonder at the shortness of human memory.  What do I mean by that?  Well a typical example is a football fan.  3 years ago Rafael Benetiz took Liverpool to the Champion’s League Final and at the time Liverpool fans were touting him as the man who could lead Liverpool to former glories.  Those same fans now want rid of him, even though at least 16 other clubs would love to be where Liverpool are …

Just about every year since 2000 has been the Year of the Linux Desktop and that latest distro is just as easy to use as Windows, and despite all efforts it’s still a poor third on latest adoption figures. If Windows XP is loosing out to anyone, its to the Mac and Windows Vista.

Oh yes, and about Windows XP.  I don’t know how many people I’ve heard say in the last year "Oh XP was so good and quick, Vista is just too slow, you need new hardware to run it properly".  Well if you’re in the the latter group, take a peruse through some of these links below from around 2002:

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2001/11/16/xp-sucks/
http://4peeps.com/ivb/index.php?showtopic=1098
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-2233-Slow-Loading-with-XP.html
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5746046.html
http://www.sciforums.com/Windows-XP-Sucks-t-6958.html
http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/windows-xp/11951-windows-xp-slow-freezes-ect.html

Sound familiar? I do seem to remember that when Windows 98 came out it ran slowly compared to Windows 95 on the same machine? Ditto Windows 2K over Win 98, Ditto XP over W2K, so is it really surprising that Vista appears slow over XP on some hardware?  Want to see Vista fly? Go get a £400 Inspiron from Dell with Home Premium. It really flies! My wife and 2 lads use it, no problems – gave a 2 min lesson on a few enhancements (Search, Tagging and UAC), they’ve found everything else via Search themselves. Installed AVG Free Edition – not had a single virus issue, mind you not even had one found!. Couple of problems with a couple of older games (haven’t we always had that? Remember 16 Bit to 32 Bit?), but they still run (sort of).

Personally, I think the move to Vista has been much less hassle than the move from Win 95 to Win 98 and less hassle than XP to XP XP2.  Microsoft still have some work to do, the urgent stuff should be out in SP1 I hope, I hope.  Vista should be the Dogs B*****ks and way better than XP ever was by end of 2008 (it already is in my opinion).

Back to Haskell next time I think

Cheers

Dave