November 15, 2007
I hate to wait (for my PC)
One of life’s minor annoyances -– made more irritating for those of us who have thrown off the shackles of Windows-based computing –- is leaving our Macs at home and then enduring all the glitchy behaviors on our work PCs that drove us crazy before we switched.
Aside from driver conflicts, programs locking up and, worst of all, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, there are the ENDLESS waits for Windows to shutdown, and … eventually … re-boot.
Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s tech guy, recently got some mail from a reader who was bothered by the slowness of Bill Gates’ favorite operating system (Thursday, November 1, 2007, page B-3).
Q: Last week, you compared the start-up time of Windows Vista to Apple’s new Leopard operating system, and found Vista to be much slower. But you used different laptops for each. What would the numbers be on the same Macintosh running the two operating systems?
A: I ran the tests again on a single computer, a fairly new Apple iMac, which can be started up and restarted, in either Vista or Leopard. I used the Mac’s Boot Camps feature, in which only one operating system is running at a time, has its own dedicated portion of the hard disk and fully controls the hardware. The machine uses an Intel processor and other key components commonly found on Windows machines, and runs Windows just like a Dell or any standard Windows PC, without any involvement from the Mac operating system.
… The test results were very similar – Leopard started and restarted much more quickly than Vista did.
In this simple test, I timed both operating systems from a cold start and a restart until the computer was fully ready for operation, with the hard disk quiet and the network connection established. The cold start, beginning with the computer completely off, took Leopard 46 seconds, but took Vista one minute and 42 seconds. A restart, beginning with the computer running an email program, the Firefox Web browser, and Microsoft Word, took one minute and two seconds for Leopard, and three minutes and 17 seconds for Vista.
When you’re filing felony cases on a deadline and the PC needs a reboot, that extra time spent staring at the screen is darn-near stroke-inducing.
At least our IT guys have something to keep ‘em busy.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 15, 2007 03:12 PM
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