Vista: Worth the wait?

And I don’t mean how long it took to come to market, either.

Today, I took delivery of an Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi (yes, all them letters), that comes with Vista Home Basic. It’s a cheap (¬¨¬£255) and cheerful laptop, but it’s only for internet and office use and replaces an older, heavier, less powerful laptop that had an accident involving a flight of concrete steps. I didn’t actually want Vista, but they don’t have any other OS option, so I intend to wipe it and install XP Pro instead. Eventually.

You see, the thing has been starting up, installing stuff, self-configuring, “checking your computer’s abilities”, installing more stuff, rebooting, restarting, and generally doing lots of other things and I haven’t even managed to burn the required restore DVD yet. It has now been doing this for over an hour and a half. At the moment, it’s running the “Acer Launch tool” and is “Cleaning up”. I might get to use it soon, you never know.

Now I know that some of this delay is down to Acer, and not Microsoft, but it was a good 40 minutes from turning it on to actually being able to configure a username and password.

Also today, I took delivery of some new 17″ iMacs. In 40 minutes, I had set both up, installed Office 2004 and Photoshop Elements 4, tested the Panasonic Lumix cameras we’ve bought work OK on them, and run System Update. I didn’t even do the two machines simultaneously – it was one after the other.

Yeah, so it’s not a scientific comparison. Yeah, it’s a laptop vs desktops, and the desktops cost more and had more RAM (512MB vs 1GB), but still – 20 minutes beats 90 minutes by way more than it really should, yes?

And now I have begun the DVD burning process, which will take a good 15 minutes more, if the countdown is correct. Joy!