We all know that Microsoft threw Windows Vista out the door faster than a Porsche 959 can reach 60m.p.h. from a dead stop. I remember hearing that initial sales of systems with Vista were pretty good. I also remember that a lot of people who bought those initial systems were pretty unhappy because with the exception of the really high end notebooks, most of the initial batch of low-end Vista notebooks really didn’t have the hardware to give a good Vista experience. On top of this Vista had terrible terrible reviews.
Our family never really had a problem with Windows Vista. My wife and I have both run Linux for a long time and we weren’t about to change, but our son had a notebook with Vista that worked okay until the day it met the ground and cracked the LCD beyond repair. We bought our son a new notebook with the same amount of RAM, a better CPU, and Windows 7. Interestingly enough he complains it’s slower than his Vista notebook (which may be true since different notebook OEMs install different software).
Recently I was asked to work on a Sony Vaio VGN-NS130D notebook. After doing a restore of the hard drive the owner complained Vista had slowed to a crawl. After about 5 minutes of use I confirmed it was crawling along. Scanning for viruses and spyware turned up nothing (Malware Bytes and Avast). I stopped all the start-up applications and it was still extremely slow.
Windows Vista
So I decided to try the restore process myself (a re-restore of sorts). Unfortunately the restore application couldn’t find anything to restore (whatever image had been restored couldn’t be re-restored). So I booted Vista in safe mode and disabled a few more applications. After doing so I was finally able to run Windows Update (something I couldn’t do before because the system was crawling along so badly). After the second update the system seemed to just hang, the third update sat at 0% for over a day without doing anything.
Fed up I decided to restore from CD. It was at this point that I discovered that the DVD-RW in the notebook was failing, it started to grind louder than the fans we have running. I couldn’t boot from DVD. The next day I borrowed an external DVD burner and was able to do a full install. It’s now after 11:15pm and I’m still running updates to get Vista up to date with security patches… but at least the system lives! (and it actually runs half-decently)