Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Slashdot aggregated an item indicating that when you play audio files in Vista, network performance slows down. Nobody's quite sure what's happening, nor (more crucially) whether it's a bug—i.e., accidental—or a consequence of a feature. If the latter, the feature is likely to be DRM, and while I don't get frothy over DRM if it doesn't get in my way—I don't for the most part use DRMed content—this is a case where Vista may well penalize users across the board for the sake of DRM, whether users are accessing DRMed content or not.

All the more reason to ask: Why should any of us bother with Vista at all? I spent a couple of hours the other night poking at Vista on my brother-in-law Bill's new laptop. The system seemed sluggish to me, even though it was clearly burning cycles furiously and did its best to cause second-degree burns on my thighs. (Note to self: Don't use modern laptops in your underwear.) The mouse pointer stuttered, as it does on my Tablet PC. I don't recall ever seeing mouse stutter under Windows 2000, which I have used daily now for almost eight years.

What's the value-add, then? I saw nothing in the UI that seemed anything other than needlessly different from XP or 2000, and certainly nothing that made the "Vista experience" easier to grasp or accomplish. I've heard the argument that Vista protects stupid users from themselves—maybe, a little—and while there might be a slim sliver of truth in that, my suspicion is that Vista exists primarily to protect Microsoft, and through them Big Media, from their users.

No thanks. That's a war I won't take part in. I've become a little worried about what will be on my next laptop—it certainly won't be a Tablet PC, egad—but was heartened recently as a friend received a slightly broken 2 GHz laptop from a neighbor who would otherwise have put it out on the curb. He replaced the keyboard with a spare purchased on eBay, and then nuked XP Home and installed Windows 2000 from a generic boxed copy. All the drivers for the specialized laptop hardware were freely downloadable. Now he has a Win2K laptop, without crapware or DRM booby traps, that runs like lightning and will not turn on him. Given that I use my laptop basically for Web and email access on trips, I don't need state-of-the-art. And that assumes that the state-of-the-art has significantly advanced on MS operating systems since Win2K. I'm not sure it has. Win2K already has symmetric multiprocessor support. Does Vista do it better? Haven't heard—and how effectively can our apps take advantage of the four or more cores you can now get in retail machines? MIT recently turned loose a 64-core CPU, expressly to see what software architectures can do with that many cores. (My guess: Without radical re-thinking and complete re-coding, not very much.)

As time allows I'm going to get a Ubuntu Feisty Fawn partition on my SX270 lab machine and spend some quality time with it. A lot of Windows software runs under Linux via Wine, and I haven't played with Wine for several years. Time to get back to it. Failing that, Windows 2000 may eventually become a compatibility layer for me, running in a VM so that I can maintain my Visio 2000 drawings and my InDesign 2.0 layouts. Vista's most significant feature may be that it isn't necessary. Paths to whatever you need to do on X86 hardware probably exist elsewhere. Keep looking. I intend to.