Stumble it!“the chrome has worn off the turd”
posted in Tech by themaiden |I’ve been running Vista for six to nine months now. I can’t remember exactly. The OS came installed on a laptop, and I was scared when I bought it. Turns out the fear was justified.
That laptop was new when I bought it and is, physically, the best box in my collection– the rest of the set being mostly Frankenstein monsters cobbled together from dead or dying predecessors. In other words, the rest of my machines are old, out of date and ad hoc. The laptop should run circles around them. It doesn’t. In fact, it, with its 1.6 Ghz processor and revolutionary Vista OS crawls along behind– just barely behind to be fair– an ancient (probably, as I can’t remember anymore) 500Mhz box running Slackware 9. Slackware, for those not in the know is now in release 11. The box in question runs 9 because the hardware doesn’t support anything higher, judging from the fact that I can’t any higher version to install. That should give you a guess at the age. Did I mention that this same Slackware 9, 500Mhz box, also runs a local Apache server, a MySQL server, and serves are my LAN’s SAMBA and print server? And it still just barely outpaces Vista running on a laptop that has nothing really to do but surf the web and run OpenOffice.
Now, you may have come to the conclusion that my laptop is slow. I don’t think you realize just how slow. It takes a good four or five minutes to boot and a good three or four to wake up. Then, even after it appears to be up and running you have to wait several additional minute before trying to start an application or, well, the system freezes for however long it feels like. And then… maybe its just me… but I feel like ripping my hair out when it takes 45 seconds to backspace over a typo.
Did I also mention that my laptop is something like 17 updates behind? Why? Because the updates never complete. Ever. Not one at a time. Not all in mass. Never. The system just prepares and prepares and prepares and prepares… but never actually updates.
I know I’m not really a technical blog but sometimes you just have to bitch. Plus, I ran across a much less bitchie and much more rational post about Vista and it set me off. I also stole the title from a line in that article.
IT HAS BEEN a year since Vista was released, and I said I could not in good conscience go there. Since then, Vista has gotten a thorough airing, has been debated more than anything in recent memory, and for the vast majority, the chrome has worn off the turd.
BTW, as soon as I have time to spare this laptop is converting to OpenBSD.
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