baldysblog.co.uk

I have written before on the subject of the Microsoft XP and Vista operation systems for personal computers but I thought I would add a bit more on the slight chance that it may be of interest to someone and also I have some more recent experiences to share.

When I have been busy working, I would buy my PCs from a company like Dell, good quality kit with a 3 year on-site repair contract however, as I am not working and as my PCs needed replacing, I have switched to building my own from components. I would point out that this is not cheaper than buying in a whole new PC from a reputable manufacturer, it will cost you pretty much the same and sometimes more.

However, it does give you a lot of flexibility for future upgrades and in my case, doing hands on stuff is part of keeping my IT skills current which is important to me and my future options. There is a friend of mine that I give support to on IT and recently he ordered a new PC from Dell which I set up for him and because he uses it for his home based consultancy business, we decided that he would stay with Windows XP. His two previous PCs a desk top and a laptop he had for over 4 years and both ran Windows XP.

Windows XP – what have they done to it ?

My friend had complained that over the previous two months, his old PC just got slower and slower which was interesting to me because I know that all he uses 95% of the time is email, the web and MS Word all of which, in terms of machine resources, are pretty lightweight. Quite interestingly, I too had a Dell Workstation PC running XP that is about four and a half years old. This particular PC is no lightweight, it was designed for computer graphics and has a lot of computing horse power but it too started running like a dog over the last few months.

I suspect that the answer lies in the constant stream of service patches you get on Windows Update, in the end, them plus older and slower PC components have just got swamped. Although you will never get any kind of formal admission from Microsoft over these issues, the fact that they will release Service Pack No.3 for XP in the next few months, “that will speed up XP by 10%”, speaks volumes.

I did have the good fortune to run an amusing experiment. My friend did not replace the laptop he had because a portable PC doesn’t fit in with the way he works so he gave me the 4 year old laptop to take away with me. Laptops are never as fast as an equivalent desktop but, this one wasn’t a bad specification, not astounding but for its generation pretty good, however it too ran like a dog. As it is a Dell and complete with all its recovery disks so I could always return it to XP, I trashed it and installed a copy of the SuSE Linux distribution.

For those who don’t know (do you live in a cave ?), Linux is a totally free operating system and 1,000s of programs (also free), that are maintained by thousands of volunteer programmers across the World. There are many different “distributions” and you could expect to pay £50 for one that comes packed in a box from Amazon etc which also contains an instruction manual. But that said, you can download any copy for free.

The bottom line of my experiment is that this “old laptop” (in computing terms), now runs like a greyhound so, the hardware isn’t broken, the Microsoft OS is the problem.

Vista vs XP Again

I do generate a lot of data because of photography and computer graphics generally. To put that into perspective, a Word document can be measured in a few Kbs – kilobytes, pictures on the other hand are always Mbs – megabytes or thousands of kilobytes.

I have three cameras in play currently and all get used pretty evenly. Each picture weighs in at either 8, 9 or 12 megabytes depending upon which camera is being used. I shoot in a format called RAW and although not all pictures go through my “digital darkroom”, those that do and get further processing through Photoshop will often end up at 50-100 megabytes per image.

Even those that aren’t immediately processed are stored in both the RAW and DNG format so regardless of what all that means in technical terms I have major immediate requirements for storage. Of course it doesn’t stop there, you need everything duplicated just in case you have a hardware failure or, you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to, if you have a copy you can bring it back. Finally I also burn back up copies to DVD.

Yesterday two brand new 500Gb hard drives arrived and yes, that is a lot of storage. These were destined for two external hard drive cases that I have, these connect to the PC externally and you duplicate files and folders to them so that you have back up copies of your important files off the hard drive of your PC.

However and before you can use a new hard drive you need to format it and a low level format on a drive that size can take a while so, having two to do, I plugged one into the XP PC and the other into the Vista one. The result was that the XP machine finished whilst the Vista one had only reached 47% in the same time, Vista is the “fat kid of the class”. There are many little things that I like about Vista but it is awesomely slow at file copying or anything like that, I would hate to be a Network Manager with a lot of Vista PCs on my network, that would be a grim experience.

Still, Service Pack 1 for Vista will be with us over the next couple of months and hopefully that will improve things but I suspect that we will have to wait until “Son of Vista” makes an appearance in 18 months or so before things will really improve. And a final footnote to show that I don’t just “kick” Microsoft when they are wrong, I am very prepared to praise them when they are right too. I recently got a copy of Office 2007 and can say that it is a very good product and I really do like the interface enhancements, they work now, if we can get the price down to a more sensible level…

One Response to “More XP & Vista Tales”