Back in November I wrote that I’d downgraded 17 Vista machines to XP, well I’m happy to report that roughly seven months later I’ve downgraded a total of 149 machines! 107 of them being laptops, and the remainder being desktops.
I’ve also moved 14 computers from Vista to various distros of Linux.
Further proof that Vista really is one of Microsofts biggest failings.
For those of you who haven’t uninstalled Windows Vista SP1 RC1 yet, remember to uninstall it before it expires on June 30th. After June 30th, you’ll be greeted by a lovely END_OF_NT_EVALUATION_PERIOD error message an hour after the machine has booted.
I’ve often wondered just how bad Vista really is on system performance, so recently when I purchased a couple of Acer laptops I decided to install XP on one and leave Vista on the other for a few tests. Basically I’m just running Geekbench and a battery life test, nothing crazy.
For the battery test, I merely pointed the browser to a URL set to auto refresh every 30 seconds and disabled all power saving features.
Both computers are the follwing:
Model: Acer Aspire 4715Z
Processor: 1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core
RAM: 2GB RAM
[ Vista ]
First, I ran Geekbench. The system scored a moderate 1911, but of course the system shipped with a bunch of bloatware, so in the interest of fairness I removed all the pre-installed software and ran Geekbench again, it then scored 1922.
The battery life gave out after 1 hour and 45 minutes of doing nothing but browsing the internet, that’s pretty sad.
[ XP ]
Running Geekbench on XP with no drivers installed, resulted in a score of 1939, only slightly higher than the Vista machine.
After installing all the drivers and re-running Geekbench I ended up with a much more statisfying score of 2168. Not as large of a difference as I expected, but still a noticeable improvement.
The battery life saw a huge jump though, ending with 3 hours and 14 minutes while browsing the internet.
I’ve been going back and forth and whether or not I should buy a UMPC. Now one could argue that I don’t need one, and they’d be right… but I can dream!
If I did buy one, I think I’d go with the Samsung Q1U-V. The base specs are decent for a UMPC (especially for its price of $799)… Intel Processor A110(800MHz), 7″ WSVGA screen, 1GB DDR2 400 RAM, 60GB 4200rpm hard drive, Intel GMA950 graphics card, and Windows Vista Home Premium (which I would replace with Windows XP Tablet Edition). Full specs are located after the jump.
In the end I opted not to purchase one, mainly because between my laptop and my iPhone I already have enough gadgets to cover my computing needs. Though I might reconsider getting a UMPC if the HTC Shift drops in price drastically.
