Burning Lemons

My new Windows Vista sporting Philips 7511 arrived from PC World earlier this morning. Compared to the MacBook it replaces the specs are fairly impressive especially considering the fairly low price. For example the MacBook came with 1GB of memory, the new laptop came with 4. The hard drive is 90GB larger etc, etc.

However how does the experience of Vista compare to OS X Leopard. I’d never previously used Vista although I had loads of experience with XP and had given Windows 7 a go on the old MacBook. So here’s a look at a few particular issues

1. The boot time

Compared to my old Macbook which could be ready to use in 40 seconds flat the new laptop take up to 2 minutes from a cold start - then it can be up to 30 seconds until the computer is actually usable. This is a major step backwards for me and I now only shut down the computer when I really, really have too - therefore wasting power - however since I only have to reboot about once a fortnight this isn’t a huge issue

2. The Interface

Vista is prettier (in my opinion at least) than Mac OS X - so long as your computer can run it the you should be fine - flip 3D is a lovely feature although I don’t really use it. Apps launch reasonably quickly and the new start menu works quite well - although an option to go back to the old flip out XP style structure without going back to a Windows 95 style menu would be lovely.

3. Searching

Windows desktop search is not nearly as good as spotlight. It is slower, doesn’t index properly and often leaves deleted files in search results for days - however a switch to Google desktop search sorted this issue for me.

I’ll come up with more comments for you over the next few days but so far going back to Windows has been far better than I expected and it’s nice to be able to use a lot of applications (OneNote I’m looking at you) without Mac versions again.