(modifications to original post in red) The following is an article excerpted from yesterday's WSJ (without permission). The opinions are not my own, as I have not used Vista, yet. The author Lee Gomes is one of their technology writers:
Vista Suffers a Lot Of Criticism, but Not All of It Is Undeserved
April 25, 2007; Page B1
Is Microsoft's new Vista operating system the troubled successor to Windows XP that many people seem to believe it is? Probably not, though after running my Expand All Folders Stress Test, I have my own complaint.
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My complaint, like many involving computers, involves something not many others would care about: the apparent inability of Windows to handle very large folders, like those containing thousands of subfolders with tens of thousands of files and hundreds of gigabytes of information.
There is a shortcut in Windows Explorer that lets you expand all subfolders within a folder with a single keystroke, meaning you can then scroll up and down and see everything in the main folder, even items hidden in a sub-sub-sub directory. (This is my preferred way to tend to my music collection.)
(removed) At first, Vista looked promising. On my command, Windows Explorer started expanding folders. But while the process started fast, it gradually slowed. By the time it got to the Zs -- or 3,597 folders later -- six minutes had gone by.
At that point, I could scroll up and down in my expanded list of folders, but slowly. The hourglass cursor wouldn't go away, and I could hear the disk drive spinning, meaning Vista was still on the case. It would take another 10 minutes for both to stop.
Being the curious sort, I wondered what my experience would be like on a Macintosh. With my home network, I copied the big folder over to a borrowed Apple and used the comparable "Expand All" feature in the Mac Finder. This is when the wow really started: All 3,600 subfolders popped open in 30 seconds.
Both the PC and Mac were recent models with powerful CPUs and plenty of memory. But maybe the Apple just had a faster disk drive. So I used the network to "mount" the PC disk drive on the Mac, without actually copying the folder, and tried the procedure again.
This time, the Mac was dealing with data physically stored on the PC, and it was needing to first go through Windows to get access to them. Even then, it did its folder expansion trick in a little over a minute and a half. So, in working with files and folders, one of a computer's most basic tasks, the Mac could do in 30 seconds what took Vista at least six minutes for, and which XP couldn't do at all.
Once you start looking for these Windows vs. Mac speed differences, it's easy to find other examples. For instance, I could shut down and then restart the Mac in the time it took either version of Windows just to switch off.
After I described my experience to them, Microsoft said I would have had better luck viewing my files in its Media Player software. As for why its file system simply wasn't more robust in the first place, it said it put its development resources in areas that affect the most people.
Despite all this, I remain a not terribly unhappy Vista upgrade user. A combination of entropy and familiarity keeps me from bolting. I also have a belief that I'd be sure to find something with the Mac to complain about as well.
Vista will slowly get better and go on to dominate computing, just like its predecessors. That's one eternal verity. Mac owners feeling aggrieved about same is another.
Email me at Lee.Gomes@wsj.com
(some original content was removed to preserve the integrity of the original article, available through the Wall Street Journal)Â
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