Sean's Blog

When my new-to-me ThinkPad showed up, I needed to put an OS on it (it came with Vista Business loaded by the seller, but I don’t trust installs I don’t do myself). My initial inclination was to go with Windows XP—I’ve used it for years, it would have been blazing on the ThinkPad, it’s pretty solid, et cetera. But the XP installer didn’t recognize the hard drive at first (I forgot about the SATA AHCI/compatibility mode setting), and I had a Vista disc and license available, so I figured I might as well try it.

It isn’t the first time I’ve tried Vista. I had installed it under VMware on my Mac quite some time ago, and was very underwhelmed by it. It was relatively slow, I hated a lot of the new interface adjustments, particularly in Windows Explorer, and I just had no reason to use it over XP. But I really didn’t give it much of a shot, as I generally have little reason to use Windows of any variety while I use my Mac (I use it to VPN into work, that’s about it). Using it on a laptop for a decent amount of time over a few days has given a distinctly different impression.

Yes, it’s a little slow, at least at first. Turning off the indexing and ReadyBoost services helped tremendously with the hard drive thrashing. Aside from the length of time required to apply all the updates, it’s actually pretty speedy now on the admittedly older hardware I’m running it on. And of course, I turned UAC off as soon as the install was finished. The improvements to it compared to XP—especially on a laptop—are quite noticeable too. The power management interface is worlds better, and the other improvements for laptop users are nice too (multiple displays, presentation modes, et cetera). And the UI changes are growing on me too (though I still prefer the 2000/XP era Windows Explorer, which is the best stock file manager I’ve seen on Windows, Mac, and Linux, in my opinion).

In short, for all the shit that Vista has gotten, it’s actually quite good, and I’d expect myself to be very pleased with Windows 7 as well, when and if I get around to playing with that. I’ve been saying for quite some time that Apple has been letting their OS stagnate compared to their competition (in the case of Vista, 3-year-old competition), and it’s really starting to show. If I had to choose between XP and OS X, it’s an easy decision in Apple’s favor. But it really isn’t an easy choice anymore. The race is definitely getting tighter, and I don’t see Apple making the continuous improvements that Microsoft has been making (and no, the Mac App Store doesn’t qualify as an improvement in my book).