Windows Vista: My Vista mobility experience

My Vista mobility experience

Today I had the most awful mobility experience with my laptop, EVAR. I don't really take my big 17" screen laptop out much, so I admit I never actually had much occasion to test how well Vista performs on the road. Well, today my wife and I took a trip down to Stanford and I really have to share exactly what my Vista Mobility user experience was.

First, just to remind everyone, I have a pretty beefy laptop. Core Duo 1.73Ghz + 1.5GB RAM + NVidia GeForce Go 7600. Nothing to brag about, but this is well above what is required for Vista.

Ok, so I was about to go, so I close the lid. At that time, I had Visual Studio open, a few notepads, MSDN, and a few IE7 windows. I frowned as I watched the HD light crank for 5 minutes before I heard everything click off into sleep mode. Nice! 5 minutes is only 500% worse than XP, so tales of Vista being 1000% worse are greatly exaggerated.

A few hours later, I arrive at Stanford Tressider Union and grab a table. I pop open the lid. For about 3 minutes, the hard drive grinds again until I finally see the video initialize and the mouse pointer appear. Still a black screen tho. Another minute passes with the HD still grinding. Finally, I see my login icon and click it. HD still grinding, my desktop appears.

I glance over at the battery and it's at 88%. Ok, so Vista just used up 12% of my battery just figuring out what to do with closing and opening the lid. Isn't 88% still a B+? That's a whole lot better than I did in college, lemme tell you. Nonetheless, I immediately switched my power mode to "Power Saver" and switched off Wifi and Bluetooth using the DV9000T's hardware wireless switch. Vista complied and a little red X appeared in my networking icons, as well as the expected device unplug sounds.

Ok, so maybe I can get 2.5 hours if I'm lucky, right? Under XP, I used to get about 3 hours since I have the high capacity battery.

1.5 hours later, I'm down to 6% and Vista kicks me out to hibernate. What was I doing? Well, I was mostly coding, which means 90% of my time was spent scrolling around VS2005 and doing an occasional compile. No games. I even turned off Desktop Composition and shut down the sidebar.

1.5 hours, folks.

You know, I told people I would deinstall Vista and reimage to XP again. But, now I have this sadistic, masochistic need to see how much more awful this can get.