Laptop running slow

You’re saying your customer bought a new PC with Vista on it, and it goes slow as all hell? Maybe the culprit was the shitloads of crap that OEMs pack onto their PCs? I’m using a One-week old Studio 15 (3 GB of RAM, 256 MB video memory… not exactly something you could get for a decent price 5 years ago but it’s more or less the standard for new PCs these days) right now with the OEM installation of Vista, and I’m encountering zero speed issues. Well, after I spent the first 10 minutes of my ownership of it removing the shit Dell puts on it, it works just fine. I don’t have the desktop stripped back, it actually is running full-blown, with a nice DreamScene background and everything. I even set up a dual-boot with XP for comparison, and guess what? No speed difference. XP actually ran a lot of things slower than Vista did. Normally I’m all on board for bashing Microsoft, but please, bash Microsoft about the things they ACTUALLY fucked up on instead of on some nice little nerd fairy tales. k?

Of course XP is going to be faster than Vista, but Windows 95 is even faster than XP, go use that. While Vista can certainly be accused of being unnecessarily bloated, XP is just as unnecessarily bloated. With new advancements in features comes a need for more powerful hardware, simple as that. Of course, you’ll always have the hardcore retards who proclaim that everything that takes up more resources than grep is unnecessary bloat. The “bloat” in Vista is no worse than XP.

And the speed difference with XP is barely even noticeable on newer machines, which is how most people obtain Vista anyway. It’s like the difference between Xfce and Gnome. It’s going to make a big difference on older machines (Any PC, built at standard for its time, made after 2005, you can just forget Vista), but on the newer hardware the difference is so small (given a competent user who is able to turn off things like Dell PC Tune-Up) as to be barely noticeable. While the very high spec requirement for Vista IS total bullshit (I can run a Linux box that’s 8 years old with all of Vista’s features, and more, with better speeds than what Vista gets under a machine that’s 3 years old), to say “Vista sux it’z so bloatedz XP ish bettarz” is an even bigger piece of bullshit.

1. You don’t need to strip back the desktop to get better “Performance”, as one of the best benefits of Aero is that most of the effects are disabled as soon as a fullscreen or maximized app is launched. If you think that the Aero look is too flashy and you prefer a simpler look, that’s fine. But don’t make your desktop look like something fresh out of the 80′s just to give yourself a false perception of “increased performance”.

2. The sidebar gadgets? Eh, although I personally find desktop gadgets to be a complete waste of time and effort, there are plenty of users who find them useful. I haven’t done any surveys to see if the majority of users like the gadgets (thus making the default worthwhile), but my advice is this: If you use it, keep it. If you don’t, dump it.

3. From my experience ReadyBoost’s inactive service isn’t that much of a performance sucker, even on sub-optimal machines. My advice with disabling services is, with most, just say no. The fractions of seconds you’ll save will instantly be negated when the time comes when you DO need that service for some reason and you spend hours frantically trying to figure out what’s wrong because you forgot that you disabled the service all those months ago. However, some services (like XP’s drive indexing) are just a waste of resources and should always be turned off. As with ReadyBoost, that’s up to the user’s own discretion. If they don’t plan to use it in the near future, go ahead and disable it.

4. This one I have the biggest quip with. While the UAC’s implementation is something I despise and it would have been very difficult for them to have done a worse job at it than they did, the feature itself should never be turned off. UAC increases the security of your PC tenfold. But again, only in the hands of competent users who understand what it is and what it means. If you open up a word document a co-worker emailed you, and the UAC pops up, something terribly wrong is happening here. In Windows World, it’s become customary for programs to constantly assume that they are running under administrator rights, and I don’t think I should have to explain to anyone why allowing every program the ability to run around and do whatever it wants is a bad idea. A transition needs to be made, and UAC is pretty much the only real compromise that could be done. If I could have it my way, UAC would require you to enter a password as well, but I’m sure many Vista users wouldn’t appreciate that <.<

The problem with UAC is that it can’t defend users against their own ignorance. Because most users don’t fully understand the UAC, they see it merely as an annoyance, an abundance of “Do you REALLY wanna do this?” messages that exist for no reason other than to piss you off. So they simply ignore the UAC’s warning, either through the Soccer Mom method of just mindlessly clicking “allow” every time the window pops up, or through the Power Nerd method of turning UAC off. But if you ignore UAC’s warning, it can’t do shit to protect you. Power Nerds also tend to think that having common sense and having malware scanners is good enough, but they’re wrong there too. Malware authors design their schemes in order to evade your common sense. Of course getting an email from a random person asking you to run this executable file they’ve attached is a red flag, but most malware authors are smarter than that nowadays. Common Sense just isn’t enough to be able to bypass all the sneaky tricks they can pull off to inject malware into your system without your knowing, and there’s no intellectual shame in that.

And with malware scanners, remind me again HOW many viruses simply attack McAfee/Norton to turn your virus scanner off so they can wreak their havoc unchecked? Hundreds? Thousands? Of course most Power Nerds have enough common sense not to use Norton or McShithole, but this applies to every malware scanner.

The UAC fails for the same reason nearly every “security feature” Microsoft implements will always fail. Security is a process, not a product. A user who understands how to be safe, while never being enough on their own, is a thousand times more useful than a piece of software any day. However, Microsoft has an absolute woody for its “Weld the Hood Shut” interface mantra. Yes users shouldn’t have to be experts to be able to work a computer (no matter how many Unix enthusiasts would love to disagree with me on this), but you should at least know enough to be able to be an efficient, effective user. But instead, Microsoft’s policy is to “protect” users from all of those “scary geek terms”, and this doesn’t help anyone. The UAC may work, but an instruction on a “free screensaver” installation website telling them to just click allow negates all of it.

Even still, the UAC shouldn’t be annoying. You can do almost everything on your computer without raising a UAC prompt, provided you’re using competent software that doesn’t need to constantly gain administrator rights to do the simplest of tasks (and I’ve never run into this kind of software myself, though I’ve heard about it. The best option here is just to switch to better software). The only times when a prompt should come up is when you’re installing/uninstalling apps, or when you’re changing system-level Windows settings. I go most days without ever getting a single prompt.

So remember kids. The problem in this case isn’t User Account Control, it’s the user.

print “End Rant.\n”

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