What happens when you wed the current fashion for lightweight, low-price subnotebooks with Windows Vista? Misery, if Laptop Mag’s look at HP’s Mini-Note is any indication.
Reviewer Joanna Stern’s attempt to use it as her primary machine doesn’t go too badly: she loves the look (“more attractive than the Asus Eee”) and finds they keyboard “very roomy.” Ah, but Vista, Vista…
“You leave me enough time to knit a sweater. And since I don’t know how to knit, waiting around felt even longer. In all seriousness, it took 2 minutes and 50 seconds to fully boot up the Vista operating system. … a Vista Experience score of 1.2 (out of a possible 5) tells you right off the bat how poorly the system handles the bulky OS. I rushed to disable the Allow/Cancel prompts (or what Microsoft calls User Account Control) from the Control Panel.”
Attention, makers of UMPCs and subnotebooks. Vista is no good. You know it, Microsoft knows it, and, more importantly, your customers know it. Making it the default for agility-class computers is madness. Enforced Vista deployment (apparently, the UK doesn’t get an XP option for the Mini-Note) has moved from “forward-looking determination” to “inexplicable act of self-destruction.”
I gave up my notebook for an HP Mini [Laptop Mag]
How massively stupid to make a low-speced machine and put a high-spec OS on it.
Massively stupid.
I’m wondering about the forthcoming Mobile Internet Device standard. If they’re lumbered with Vista, it’ll be an interesting illustration of the strange gulf between what Microsoft sells and the hardware it sells it for. That point Technogeek made here about Microsoft being a marketing company that just happens to be market technology comes to mind.
It’s *worse* than Windows ME, to my mind: that was the last revision of a dead OS, and MS could let it wither as the world moved to NT derivatives. But this time around, Vista has plenty of competition, not least of which is XP, which it’s supposed to replace.
I was going to get one of these and throw ubuntu on it, The I thought i might go for the more beefy tablet PC that HP has. I think though, That I’m just going to live with the laptop I have and get a 1080p LCD TV instead.
Never mind vista: there’s a classic photo of a woman developing a back problem.
Get a machine with a decent monitor at a proper hight!
Then worry about which OS to run.
Devistafy.
Devistafied.
Devistafication.
All are brand new words entering the English language.