Windows Vista earns ire of users with longer startup and shutdown times
If the security flaws, optimization flaws and limited backwards compatibility of Vista aren’t bad enough it has gone to an entirely new level with users now getting angry at Microsoft for claiming faster start up and shut down times on Vista and not delivering. Greg Keizer of Computer World decided to check out exactly what was going on with this so he rounded up a few comments from the Performance and Maintenance forum where several users of Vista complained about the slowness of Vista compared to XP running on identical systems, in some cases.
One user wrote, “Recently I upgraded from XP to Vista [Home] Premium. When I start the laptop and I see the last BIOS info and Vista starts loading, then I have to wait a full 6 (six!) minutes before I can open my first application (for example Outlook or IE or whatever).”
Of course, startup and shutdown times with any operating system are going to be hardware dependant. If you have a system that ran XP SP0 just fine you probably discovered that when it was updated to XP SP2 it became incrementally slower. It stands to reason that if these people didn’t bother to upgrade their system that Vista will be all the slower on it.
According to Microsoft, “We have seen, based on both internal and external measurement and testing, that most Windows Vista users experience very quick responses when using sleep, shutdown or restart. In fact, the majority of users will have start-up and shutdown times that are faster than they would have been with Windows XP, if users take advantage of Windows Vista’s default sleep setting, they can achieve two-to-three second resume times.”
I would agree with their statement and not what the users on the forum are saying because I can honestly say that with all six computers I installed Vista, they were either quicker at starting up and shutting down or there was no difference between XP and Vista. It would be interesting to see exactly what kind of hardware all these people were trying to run Vista on, I expect some would have an almost comedic list of ancient and outdated hardware but sometimes I make assumptions that are wrong and I might be wrong. My experience has been wonderful with Vista, while it could do with some improvements; it’s certainly not the error prone slow beast these people make it out to be.
To give you an idea of my experience here are the two computers I use on a regular basis with Vista installed on them:
An Acer Aspire 5670:
Core Duo Processor at 1.67GHz
1.5GB of DDR2 Memory
120GB 5400RPM hard drive
2GB ReadyBoost flash drive
ATi Radeon X1600 with 128MB of dedicated memory
A Desktop (homebuilt):
Athlon 64×2 3800+ processor at 2.4GHz (overclocked, because I can)
2GB of PC3200 Memory
Two 160GB hard drives
Geforce 8800GTS with 320MB of dedicated memory
Those are the specs that matter and I wouldn’t exactly consider the systems as a whole to be high-end but certain components are. For me, Vista starts up in about 25 seconds and shuts down in maybe 10 but that’s on average based on a quick test I did just now. I really don’t know what these people are complaining about.
It doesn’t stop there, users complain about how some programs are slow to launch. Not for me, so again, I really have no idea what’s going on. All I know is that on my laptop everything was almost instantaneous before and with the ReadyBoost drive plugged in, it’s as close to instant as you can get for small programs like Microsoft Photo Viewer and PhotoShop which I would consider to be a resource hungry slow to launch program is up and running in about 5 or 6 seconds.
As for my desktop… it’s just as fast with or without the ReadyBoost feature enabled and since you can’t share ReadyBoost drives with different computers I just use it with my laptop where it makes minor but noticeable differences.
Then the new sleep and hibernate features well, that’s where I have a problem when using either on my laptop when Vista comes back, processor usage is at a constant 50% and the only way to correct that is to restart. I can’t use those features on my desktop at all because it messes with the overclocking I have done on the processor. Besides, I usually just shut down when I’m not using the computer or just let it go to screensaver when I’m away so the new Sleep and Hibernate options don’t really do me any good though I wouldn’t mind if Microsoft somehow managed to fix the processor usage problem after resume.
Someone needs to figure out why some users are having problems and why most aren’t but we aren’t going to get those answers from Microsoft.
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I really dont agree with those users. Most times startup times are increased due to unnecessary programs in the startup systray, like winamp, powerarchiver or winzip, quicktime etc. The list is endless. I clocked mine at 20 secs