The “Break it Down” Blog

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on a new Sony Vaio that the author got with Windows Vista on it and how sluggish the laptop is overall. My favorite quote from the article is:

I also was shocked at how long this machine took to restart and to do a cold start after being completely shut down. Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds.

So MacBook takes 29 seconds to boot and Vaio with Vista takes 2, almost 3 minutes… that’s 5x slower. I guess I can see why Microsoft worked on ReadyBoost with so much vigor… without it you’ll likely just throw your laptop through a window waiting for it.

The author also went on to rant about how much crap comes pre-installed on laptops now adays, and I have to completely agree with him there. I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 recently and half of every program that was installed (including the system utils and default Windows apps) were complete trash-trial-software.

I love how the manufacturers claim it’s for the benefit of the user that they pack the system so full of junk, naturally it has nothing to do with subsidizing the cost of the laptop to increase profit margins. Oh no, it’s all about the end user.

You know, just like when they stopped included utility disks, OS disks and recovery CDs with the laptops as well and require you, on first boot to burn your own damn DVDs of the disk-image if you want a recovery disk. Yep, that’s all for the end-user too. Oh wait, no it’s not.

Now that I think about it, the end user is really the problem here. Damn us.