James Kendrick takes on Vista and mobile devices in his post JK opinion- Vista will never run well on mobile devices.

I disagree with some significant portions of James’ argument. So here goes:

“First and foremost in the area of performance.  I have not seen adequate performance running Vista on anything less than a Core 2 Duo processor. ”

James, every day Vista runs just fine on my original Q1. I’ll put my app usage up against anyone but a developer. Every day I run Outlook, ERP, SQL, Firefox/IE, Excel all at the same time, often with Live Writer and OneNote open too.

I agree that 512k isn’t enough. 1 gig of RAM ran fine for me. 2 gigs in the Q1 is beautiful. I hit 100% on the processor long before I use up the RAM now.

I also agree that the new Intel mobile processors, the A1xx series, can’t keep up. I think they were a response to the threat from VIA and that they sacrifice too much performance for a boost in battery life.

“If you use Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-la land where the device fails to resume properly.  Sometimes the device comes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful.  Other times it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a few seconds.  Both of these situations require a hard boot by turning off the power, which not even the OS likes, and then sitting through a boot time even longer than normal.”

I don’t see this issue. I’m sure that I don’t sleep and resume as much you do during the day but I do sleep the machine several times a day, every day. Right now I’m rebooting a lot less than once a week with typical usage at 10-12 hrs per day. I do see hiccups, sometimes the touch screen doesn’t come back. Re-resuming fixes it. Switching from external monitor to the internal LCD takes too long but it almost never fails to come back from resume.

The icing on this flickering cake is when Vista fires up the UAC in the middle and asks for permission to continue.  This fires off additional rounds of screen flickering and disk thrashing enough to give the user concern that the system is going to hang up.  Just for grins I’ve refused the permission request to see what would happen and you get the same flickering and disk thrashing just to get back where you started.  How silly is that?

Why the heck are you still running UAC? Are you simulating an ordinary user? You’re a bright guy. You don’t visit dangerous sites or open suspicious email. I get the occasional disk thrashing but since applying some of the changes that ctitanic and others have mentioned it’s greatly reduced. I see it when I connect and disconnect my monitor but not when I stick to being docked or undocked and it’s not any worse than XP. The playlist function in the Origami Experience is a performance pig with large playlists but its only that app.

So here’s my final take. I remember that before I switched to Vista my XP install had become so unstable that I couldn’t get through a day without several reboots. I remember the frustration of navigating XP with a pen. I’m quite happy with Vista despite the quirks. It could be that I came off of a Dell laptop running a Pentium M at 1.2 ghz so the move down to the Q1 wasn’t as painful as it could have been (with 512k it WAS painful.)

Now James, I know you’ve used Vista on more mobile devices than anyone so how about this? You send me a few, maybe the P1610, the Q1P, the R2H and I’ll try Vista on them. If I don’t like the way Vista runs, I promise to send them back to you.  

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