It's Official, Vista sucks.

eWeek just posted an article about how bad Vista sucks on new laptops here:

Cheap Laptops Bad for Vista, Good for Linux

Here is my response:

Im a VAR, and I can guaranty you Vista is slow on ANY laptop. We had one client buy a new Vista Home laptop because he couldn't hang with his old slow Win2000 one. Then he decided to pay us to clean out his old one for his wife. It had decent stats on it, so I wiped the hd and put XP on it. After installing office and antivirus and etc., the old laptop ran circles around the new Vista one. It was pretty rediculous, the old XP machine was WAY faster. I was just glad we hadn't recommended that he buy the Vista laptop, he did that on his own.

Now then, I also design websites, and do a lot of graphics and marketing stuff. So, about 6 months ago I bought a brand spanking new $3600 Dell XPS laptop with the fast hard drive, big graphics card and the whole nine yards (except the internal tv card, I heard they just drain the battery faster). Don't be too jealous, I waited 8 1/2 years between top of the line laptops. So, I was ecstatic when I got my shiny new laptop home.

What to do with a shiny new super fast WinXP laptop? Step one: update windows and office. Step two: install and update antivirus, a good firewall, live spyware and adware protection, Windows Defender, Firefox and script blocking applets.. and a sandbox for good measure. Step three: run around the house ranting and raving because your brand spanking new super fast laptop has all the speed and pizazz of a bowl of split pea soup. Still in the can.

Step four: Repartition your hard drive and install Linux.

I've been running OpenSUSE since day 2, and haven't looked back since. Screw Windows, My XP partition crashed three months ago (for NO apparent reason) and I never bothered fixing it. I'm recommending all my clients with any sort of security problems start migrating to Linux. Servers first, then the workstations as the need arises.

With a stable Linux distro and Crossover Office, there is no reason to maintain slow clunky security hole ridden Windows software. Ok, Quickbooks only has a Linux server, so there's one reason, but there are business accounting solutions in place in Linux, and the powers that be are predicting that Quickbooks is going to get they're butts handed to them if they don't come up with a Linux client BUT quick.

So there you are, hands on experience from a guy in the field with tons and tons of real world experience. Quit whining that Vista is ok. You are wrong, and 9 out of 10 conspiracy theorists believe that Microsoft pays you to troll websites promoting Windows anyway. ;)

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