Vista Bloatware

My old and faithful ThinkPad T41 is dying... Must be some kind of mechanical fatigue, as it runs very well when sitting on my desk, but any attempt to move it results in a total blackout. Suddenly I have a fixed laptop... On the other hand this is the most graceful death of a computer I can imagine, since I can still access all the data and settings while preparing a new machine. Generally I have been very happy with IBM/Lenovo, so I decided to stick with the manufacturer. I have anticipated a lot of changes in notebooks over the three years I have been using the T41. But after a quick browse through what is available today, I found (to my surprise), the industry has barely moved an inch forward... At least judging by the specs. I decided to go for a convertible, notebook / tablet design, so the obvious choice has been the X61 from Lenovo. Quick look at the specs and I am surprised:

• CPU speed: 1,6GHz (my 3-years old T41 is 1,5GHz, but OK, the X61 has actually two cores...)
• Storage capacity: 160GB (same as the recently upgraded T41)
• Battery life: 5 hours with a large 8-cell battery (same as T41)

But the T41 has been really dying so I did not have too much time to look for the current holy grail of notebooks. The risk: preloaded Windows Vista. Trying to avoid Vista for some time now has probably been a sign of me getting older. A few years ago I would kill just to be able to play with the new shiny OS. But I have been talking to many people, asking what advantages Vista has had... and nobody could really tell... So after making sure I can upgrade to Windows XP in case Vista does not meet my expectations, I decided to order the machine. BTW my expectations are not very elevated these days. Two basic applications I run (Firefox and Microsoft Outlook) have to be running smoothly and I need storage for all the music and photos, 160GB will do for now, I will be upgrading the hard drive in a year or two, but hey, have done this with ThinkPad before :).

I turned the machine on as soon as it arrived on Friday. It kept spinning the drive for several hours setting things up just to announce in the afternoon it was ready. In the meantime it downloaded more than a gigabyte of patches and hot-fixes and rebooted itself a dozen times. On Saturday I found it still keeps spinning the hard drive (indexing files?) and the extended battery dries out much qucker than anticipated (definitely I was not going to achieve the 5 hours up time...). I startet getting rid of all the extra software supplied. More than twenty executables on the Windows autorun list. Half of them gone now. Norton Internet Security. Gone. Diskeeper. Gone. A number of funny Lenovo enhancements. Gone. The drive slowed down. But one of the CPU cores kept on ticking on a 25% load - a definite reason for the high battery drain. Downloaded the Sysinternals Process Explorer to find the WmiPrvSE.EXE - the Windows WMI handler being responsible for the high CPU usage and the subsequent trails led to the iPlusManager - a mobile connectivity application from my cellular data provider interfacing with the Option Globetrotter HSDPA modem (even when the modem is not present...). So that is gone from the Autostart list too, I will be launching the application when I really have to connect on the road.

Some twenty hours later I have the computer more or less usable, Firefox is running (no Outlook yet) and the memory usage settled on 1,1GB. Geeezzz... this used to take less than a quarter on T41/Windows XP... Setting up Firefox was not a piece of cake either. I had to start it several times "as an administrator" to let the plugins install... Then it took me two hours to install PDF Creator, the tool I use every day. First I run the installer just to see it fail and not being able to uninstall until I disabled the UAC (User Account Control) via MSCONFIG.EXE, rebooted, uninstalled the non working installation of PDF Creator, enabled the UAC and rebooted again. Finally I succeeded installing PDF Creator as a network printer using the PDFCreator-0_9_3_GPLGhostscript.exe server install run as administrator in Windows XP compatibility mode.

After years of laziness introduced by Windows 2000 and especially Windows XP I feel again like in the old DOS days - having to dig here and there and try various settings before the application successfully runs in the end. This may sound funny, but unfortunately Vista is the proof things are definitely not going in the right direction... I do not feel anything in Vista is substantrially better than it has been in XP. I would not install Vista, I have done that being somehow forced by the hardware vendor giving me no other choice. It is very likely Vista is the last incarnation of a client operating system, as we know. By the time Microsoft is ready with its successor (by 2012?) we will probably not have too many things to do offline and to store locally. In 2012 I will not care what OS runs my applications, as they all will run in the Internet cloud. And my portable device will be just a window to look at that cloud...