Paul Thurrott & my mini 5536 Review

I’d venture to guess that this blog entry title might catch some interest. The first night I downloaded this latest build of Vista I installed it on my Dell Inspiron 9300 (2ghz Pentium M w/1G RAM, 256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 6800) and posted my initial thoughts about the build. When I awoke in the morning I had received multiple instant messages and was told that my blog entry had gotten linked to many places and reviewed in other articles. I’ll be honest, I was quite shocked. Apparently WindowsConnected has more reader base and influence than I had realized. Even the great Paul Thurrott and Winsupersite.com apparently read my short post. http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5536.asp

Now, while not mentioned directly there’s a small little shot at me in the article about my stating that this build’s performance was ‘3 times faster.’ “(Though the three times performance improvement baloney you might have read elsewhere is not only impossible but untrue.)” I have to admit Paul, this really made me laugh. First I should mention that I read winsupersite.com regularly, every day in fact, at least when there is new content. Secondly, I would note that I do not consider myself a proficient writer at all, nor even an expert on Vista or Microsoft. I consider myself to be someone who is very good at my job and my field, and I like to post my thoughts and experiences with products. That said Paul, I have been rather disappointed in your articles as time goes on. It would seem that lately you have been more interested in trying to create this ‘impartial journalist’ reputation (because you seem to get rather offended that people think you are a ‘Microsoft lackey’) rather than reporting the plain facts. Of course I might be wrong and I am interpreting your comments from my perspective, just as you did by saying my comment of ‘3x the performance’ is ‘impossible, untrue, and baloney.’ Even though I wrote that review in the early hours of the morning after a long week, I stand by the statement. That statement was referring to the past performance of build 5472 on my laptop. From my experience and perspective, 5472 was the buggiest and slowest performing build since Beta2. The windows search service crashed on me continually (I mean literally as soon as the service would restart it would crash) generating errors in my taskbar into the hundreds. I would have to disable the service just so that I wouldn’t have to click “close” over and over again. Also, the RAM consumption was through the roof and therefore created a massive page file on my laptop, whose drive happens to be at 5400 RPM. This, plus many factors caused that build to run very, very slowly. So Paul, with the improved memory usage, lack of constant crashes and errors as well as better driver support, Pre-RC1 build 5536 really does run ‘3x times faster’ on my machine. Please, quote me on that.

Now, on to my short review of my experiences so far in 5536. First I would love to mention that my laptop now easily and without errors resumes from stand-by and hibernation modes. This is a fantastic thing as up until this point either it would take up to 3 minutes to resume from standy or it would BSD or give me an array of other errors. Below is a list of other differences I have noticed from build 5472;

• Office 2007 Beta 2 seems to run much faster and smoother now, and I have experienced far less crashes when opening/closing files and browsing for files.
• The installation process took about 15 minutes less than build 5472.
• The entire OS is far more responsive with it very rarely cranking my hard drive.
• My battery seems to last long, but I haven’t tweaked the power saving settings yet, so I’ll keep an eye on this one.
• Application compatibility seems improved with apps such as Photoshop and Nero Burning Rom.
• Windows Media Center is vastly improved and is much prettier.
• I decided to install my first IE toolbar for once. I’ll let you know in the future what I think of the ‘Windows Live Toolbar’, which is directly linked after installation, along with Live Messenger, Live Mail, etc.