December 2006

Wow, that’s all I can say is wow.

I’ve spent the better part of half a day putting Vista and Office Ultimate on a NEW (Vista Ready) Dell D620.

Now this baby (the Dell) is loaded, as loaded as I could get. Core 2 Duo 2.33ghz, 7200 RPM drive, dedicated video, etc, etc.

I previously wrote what a sloth Outlook 2k7 is on my D820 (core Duo), and really had hoped that starting ‘Fresh’, I would see a big improvement, but no.

Eye candy is great, but the hard drive on that laptop has not stopped churning since I booted it up.

I don’t know what it’s indexing as it only has the OS, Office, and FireFox and one utility to mount images installed. This is vanilla as it gets.

It’s just not there. So unless Santa is bringing us all new hardware, and I mean faster than what I have just purchased, this is not an OS we’re ready to jump in and roll out.

I’m going to continue to play with it, but if getting performance means turning off all the things that make Vista, Vista. Then what’s the point?

I’ll soon be doing the same with a new MacBook Pro in the next week or so. My understanding is that people feel the Apple hardware is plenty fast even when using Parallels. We’ll see, perhaps I expect too much.