An Agony of Windows-ness

[Humph]

I've spent the last two days transferring a dozen Windows XP users and computers from one site to another. It really brought home to me how much programmatic latency there is in Windows systems, compared with my Ubuntu desktop machine.

Every, and I mean every, time I attempted to do something I had to stand around waiting for anything from 30 seconds to 15 minutes while whatever it was that Windows decided it needed to do was being done. I was left feeling very frustrated at the amount of time being wasted.

And then, oh glory of glories, I was asked to sort out a Vista Home Ultimate laptop. This thing was specced to heaven and back, and ran like a one legged, inebriated mongrel on tranquilisers, thanks to the travesty of an Operating System that was inflicted upon it. "Inoperating" would be a more descriptive term, I think.

It took *four* hours to uninstall Norton Internet Security Center, Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition, apply updates and install AVG Antivirus, Ad-Aware Home 2007. Four damn hours! Comparing that with the hour or so I spent doing it on a lesser specced XP laptop, and I honestly felt like bursting into Man-Tears.

I'm just so glad the pain is finally over and I'm back with my spanky Ubuntu box.

/Diatribe

[b0ng0]

Sounds like you had a dodgey setup. I have Vista premium on my laptop and its very responsive.

[cookieofdoom]

The installs probably took so long on the Vista desktop because of DRM protection. My understanding is that every file transfer it makes takes longer because it has to check for DRM stuff.

[n3tfury]

I've spent the last two days transferring a dozen Windows XP users and computers from one site to another. It really brought home to me how much programmatic latency there is in Windows systems, compared with my Ubuntu desktop machine.

Every, and I mean every, time I attempted to do something I had to stand around waiting for anything from 30 seconds to 15 minutes while whatever it was that Windows decided it needed to do was being done. I was left feeling very frustrated at the amount of time being wasted.

And then, oh glory of glories, I was asked to sort out a Vista Home Ultimate laptop. This thing was specced to heaven and back, and ran like a one legged, inebriated mongrel on tranquilisers, thanks to the travesty of an Operating System that was inflicted upon it. "Inoperating" would be a more descriptive term, I think.

It took *four* hours to uninstall Norton Internet Security Center, Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition, apply updates and install AVG Antivirus, Ad-Aware Home 2007. Four damn hours! Comparing that with the hour or so I spent doing it on a lesser specced XP laptop, and I honestly felt like bursting into Man-Tears.

I'm just so glad the pain is finally over and I'm back with my spanky Ubuntu box.

/Diatribe

sounds to me like the heads of your IT dept need to rethink how and what they deploy. this isn't a windows issue, this is poor desktop management.