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Vista performance: The user experience is all that matters
13 comments- IT TOPICS:Operating Systems, Windows & Microsoft
Is Vista a dog? Last week when I commented about Wall Street Journal technology writer Walter Mossberg's disappointment with the slow boot up times for Windows Vista I had no idea how things would snowball. Strong negative comments about Vista made in my blog by some early users lead Computerworld's Greg Keizer to look into early adopter perceptions in a subsequent Computerworld story.
ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley then picked up on that in her column, Vista: What ever happened to fast boot? "From the reaction on the Vista support forums, it doesn't seem like users are cottoning to Microsoft's sleep/hibernate Vista settings," she says.
Foley makes a good point. Microsoft used to brag about boot up times with previous versions. No more. It's a good thing that Microsoft decided not to go with the Rolling Stones "Start Me Up" marketing strategy when it launched Vista. The way these early adopters tell it, this dog won't hunt.
Then came Ed Bott's Is Vista really slow to start up?. Bott derided posts in this blog and in the Performance and Maintenance Forum, some of which were cited in Keizer's story, as "Testimonials from a bunch of guys on the Internets, complete with inflammatory quotes and a requisite helping of snark."
Bott criticized Keizer for not interviewing more early users outside of the online forums. Personally, I'm not to bothered by that. Certainly a story that gauges online user reaction to Vista has value, particularly at this early stage in the game. The online folks are what marketing folks like to call "thought leaders," not just a "bunch of guys on the Internet." Frankly, there just aren't a lot of Vista users to ask at this point. Until Vista reaches critical mass, these early users create the buzz, and the buzz -- rightly or wrongly -- is that Vista performance is disappointing.
Bott also took Computerworld to task for not running its own tests and turning what is a news story into a review. It's not our judgment that matters -- Computerworld is first and foremost about what users are saying in the real world. Such tests would be interesting, but it would be pretentious for a bunch of journalists to conduct some abstract tests and then tell users who bought into Vista that what they're seeing is wrong.
Bott's solution was to run his own tests by doing a clean install of XP and Vista on a single system in his office and time the boot up process. The differences, he concludes, are negligible. That's valid in the abstract, but represents one data point in a test lab setting.
Bott's results also coincide with Computerworld Windows expert Scot Finnie's opinions of Vista's performance overall. But Bott's results are by no means universal. According to a more in depth test by the CRN Test Center (Tech Analysis: Windows Vista Sucks Performance), Vista is not only slower to boot up, but underperformed XP in 18 of 24 tests, and totally sucked wind on six of those.
Both are abstract tests results that can be meaningless in the real world, where out of the box experience is all that matters. It doesn't matter if Vista truly does boot up as quickly as XP from a clean install if that's not what happens when the buyer brings home the machine as configured by HP or Emachines or Dell and turns it on.
My neighbor Kary doesn't know much about computers. She just needs one to create and print class schedules and save digital photos. Last week she brought home an HP Pavillion a1000 equipped with 1 GB of RAM, an Athon 64 3800+ processor and Windows Vista Home Premium preloaded. She had trouble almost immediately and brought it to my office the the other day for assistance. She says it's slower than her older XP machine. Should I tell her she's wrong? I turned on her machine and, as configured, it took just over two minutes to load Vista. For Kary, Vista has been a nightmare. I'll talk about why next time.
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