Vista – is it time to own up and admit a mistake?

As I had written in my last entry, I recently got myself a brand new notebook with a Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 processor at 2GHz with 3 GB RAM running Windows Vista. And I expected the performance to rock. Boy, have I been in for a disappointment and now I am beginning to toy with the idea of eating my pride and upgrading to XP!

Some of the worst issues I have encountered were around –

• Microsoft Outlook 2003 – it would take forever to view an email in the reading pane and almost 10 minutes to load up the 12 reminders from the calendar. Downloading my email from our IMAP server took hours. Very inspiring to see how well one Microsoft product worked on the latest and greatest Microsoft client OS.
• Network Performance – my download speeds were significantly slower using my new notebook compared to other older computers on my home network running XP. Running the speed test on http://www.speedtest.net showed almost a fifth the performance on the other computers. This was true on both FireFox and IE.
• Random Computer Freezes – my new notebook has been freezing up randomly – at times, it does that but comes back after 30+ seconds if I stay patient. At other times, I have given up after ~4-5 minutes and just done the hard reboot.

From my various web searches, I have seen that I am far from being alone in this boat! It boggles my mind that state-of-the-art products can have such basic issues out of the box. And when I take into account that these issues are perplexing and killing me, I shudder to think what other less-technical users must be going through! Absolutely unbelievable – makes one wonder where we are headed with software advancements. And this is not limited to Microsoft – I have had my issues with enterprise-level software from IBM, Oracle, SAP as you know from some of my previous posts.

I did manage to get past my Outlook issues – I tried a variety of configuration changes at the Outlook/OS level – I am not entirely sure what worked. One of the things I did that potentially helped solve my issue was executing netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable on a command prompt run with administrator access.

However my network performance has been spotty – again turning off the auto tuning seemed to help and my download speeds per the speedtest.net site did go up to the level of matching my XP systems, but today I am getting frustrated with copying 400MB worth of data in ~1300 files over the VPN to my notebook – it is taking longer than 2 hours! I am not sure what the heck is up with this!

Additionally, I have recently been experimenting with vmware and have run into some fairly basic issues with vista/vmware adding to my frustrations. Keeping my fingers that I am past those issues.

If I cannot resolve these network performance/computer freeze issues soon, I will be seriously looking to switch back to XP! 😦