It’s not surprising that Vista take-up has been poor (PCW February 2008, Editorial) – its cost-performance benefit is truly awful. I was interested in Vista, and built a PC for its evaluation knowing that it would be hungry - Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU, 1GB (later 2GB) 1,333GHz FSB memory and an Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe motherboard.

The performance is comparatively poor with Vista Business Edition, even after tweaking. It takes around one and a half minutes to start, even with Superfetch turned of. I seem to spend a lot of time downloading so-called important updates (at least 4GB so far).

How can a product be so buggy and avoid the interest of Trading Standards? Comparison of performance between identical applications on an AMD 3000+ with 512MB memory shows little or no improvement, especially on processor-intensive applications such as AGI Satellite Toolkit (STK), or Mathcad with fairly complex recursive algorithms for evaluation. It may be great for games – I would not know or care.

I recently bought a laptop for a relative (2GHz dual core CPU, 1GB memory, Vista Home Premium) and this takes around a minute to start (again with Superfetch turned off), but this is before a significant number of applications have been installed.  It runs the flashy Aero interface adequately, but for what?
I also have a Sony T2XP laptop, 1.2GHz processor, 1GB memory, running XP SP2. This takes around 25 seconds to start from hibernation (90 seconds from cold), does all I want in word processing, Mathcad and STK, and goes to sleep quickly without spending minutes updating its dodgy operating system; ideal for working 'on the road'.

The configuration (in terms of installed applications) is almost identical to the Vista evaluation machine. People (and companies) are right to be cautious about paying out good money for 'more is actually less' in terms of performance where simple functionality is concerned.

Vista may be more secure, and fine if permanently powered up to allow it to update in the silent hours, but aren’t we supposed to be saving the planet by switching off our computers when not in use? Vista seems to have been devised for a different era, for a leisured society with time to waste (or possibly to wait), and with deep pockets to buy what is apparently unnecessary hardware.

Peter Swallow