Site Navigation
The version of IE7 was 7.0.6.
The first thing I noticed was that the typing speed was remarkably slow. I am not a very fast typist. My typing speed (adjusted for errors) is about 40 words per minute. But in order to use iGoogle Talk, I had to slow my typing speed down to less than 10 words per minute. Generally speaking Vista seemed slow, but the problem was most noticeable when using iGoogle, especially iGoogle Talk.
This problem was not as severe after installing Firefox.
One of the requirements for iGoogle Talk is Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher. So this might be a combination of problems.
The improvement in performance from installing Firefox was dramatic. But the performance of Vista was still sluggish even with Firefox. And I still had to slow down my typing!
Another difficulty I encountered was finding a file that I downloaded from the Internet. I had checked my credit card statement, which had downloaded a PDF. Then I wanted to delete the PDF (since it contained information that only I need to see). I tried clicking on the search item. But was unable to persuade it to search for the item. Finally I started up a command prompt and entered the command "dir /s *.pdf", reasoning that the file would be in one of the sub-folders.
But why make it that difficult to find a file?
I have to admit, that even though I was expecting poor performance, I was surprised at how slow and difficult to use, the Vista computer was. The performance was not bad --- It was appalling!
I googled for "IE7+Vista+slow+iGoogle" and got 32000 matches. "IE7+Vista+slow" returns 326000 matches. To date the only Windows machine that I use regularly is a Windows XP workstation at my workplace (like many corporates, they still haven't woken up to the fact that it is bad idea to let Microsoft anywhere near your legacy data).
Despite the fact that Vista machines are (ipso facto) more powerful, with more memory, more disk space and more powerful graphics processors ... This particular machine, that I used in NZ, was slower than XP running on a much older machine. And Microsoft XP is hardly one of the top performers in the computer performance stakes!
Of course, I may be a bit unreasonable, by using this one example of my first encounter with Vista. But if this is typical, then I predict that no amount of advertising can disguise the truly dreadful performance of Vista. Has software bloat finally overtaken the performance gains of Moore's Law? (not really a law at all -- just a temporary reprieve from the inevitable, rapidly approaching, quantum barrier) ...
Many Microsoft proponents are telling us to expect great and wonderful things from the new SP1 release (just shipped) ... Promising bug fixes and performance improvements ... well there certainly is lots of room for improvement in the performance arena ... Will it make a silk purse out of this sow's ear?
I doubt it.