Microsoft Vista: Worst Technology of 2007

(Cartoon via mringlein)

Yesterday, I mentioned that Microsoft Vista got voted the Worst Gadget of 2007. James Kendrick explains one of many reasons why:

This morning began like many other days. I grabbed the Fujitsu P1620 out of the dock. I put it dutifully to sleep which took only 3 seconds and then threw it in my gear bag. I headed across town and walked into my morning meeting and sat down. At 9:10 the meeting got underway and I hit the power button on the Fujitsu to wake it up from its slumber and to get to work. The disk thrashed for almost 20 MINUTES before the Fuji was ready to be used and I missed taking notes for the first part of my meeting. The hard disk indicator light was on solid for that 20 minutes and the system was not usable for that time. It took 10 minutes before the fingerprint reader was asking for me to swipe in which I did and another 10 minutes while Vista Business resumed to a point that the system was responsive. This is the first time I've experienced this on the Fuji but not the first time I've seen it on other systems. Vista is so bad on mobile systems and it's time for something to be done. I'll likely have to edit the registry and turn off pieces of Vista to get around this. Sheesh.

I guess that helps explain this:

At Bowdoin College, about half of the computers are Macs, and half are PCs. When Apple released the latest version of OS X in October, professors with Macs immediately swamped the IT department to ask about the long-awaited Leopard. But after Windows Vista, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, came out over a year ago, there were no such requests.