Vista Take 2

Talked to Paul yesterday about his laptop. We got the same laptop so I wanted to know how his was working out for him. Come to find out he is having problems with Vista being slow as well. He said it was fine, but it was pretty unimpressive out of box in terms of speed, etc.

I told him I was obtaining an actual copy of Windows Vista Home Basic(we have a partition with the Vista files on it instead of an actual install DVD) so we could install that from scratch and see if that effected the slowness of the laptop. I mentioned that he could downgrade to XP, he said he might consider that if Vista kept sucking really bad.

Today I installed Vista Home Basic(which I have a license to) on my laptop minus all the Lenovo craplets. After installing the Intel driver things are MUCH faster in Vista. So much so it seems most of the bloat was from the infitinty of programs Lenovo installs by default.

I am blogging this from IE7 which seems mostly fine. The icon set in Vista is ugly to my taste, but after everything elsa, Vista seems ok. I set it to look like Windows classic and by and large it resembles Windows 2000/XP save the ugly iconset.

I setup Vista in a 20G partition and will keep it around as long as I care to. One thing I noticed that Vista does better compared to XP is pick up all the drivers save the video by default. This is a huge improvement over XP, though, to be fair, XP is 7-8 years old.

All in all its not too bad, but I do prefer Ubuntu. Now that Vista is not as slow, I can run it through the paces I have wanted to since I got it. In the end I may well end up selling it, but its fun to try it out anyway.