Let's let Bill Gates have the last word about Windows Vista
... as he did, in this widely-circulated but still fascinating and completely winning video clip.
I agree with my Atlantic colleague Ms. McArdle that computer operating systems should be a matter of practicality rather than ideology. (Although I prefer to think of myself as a pantheist, rather than an agnostic like her.) I've always had both Mac and Windows systems and have continually tried out others. It's a question of where your "real" work gets done, and that's what I'm reexamining to see how much of a PITA it would be to change..
And in response to one of many very interesting emails....
I noticed that both you and your friend both experienced long resume times from hibernate. There's good reason for that, which is that it has to read your complete memory state from disk. This is a very slow process, which is limited by hardware. I was wondering -- why don't you just use sleep/standby? My Thinkpad wakes up in about 1 second and is completely responsive. I always hear people complain about hibernate, but my thought is always -- why use it then?
I say: you're right. The Vista "sleep" command actually works very well. But it draws a little bit of current, and when you're really hoarding power or shutting down for a long time, "hibernation," which draws no current, would seem the better choice. EXCEPT for the very slow recovery time. In part that's is because a system like mine has to read 2GB worth of memory-state from the hard disk. But it's also ... something else, since even after the computer appears to have regained its previous state it takes an inexplicably long time before it will respond to any commands.
Oh well. As Bill Gates says above, Ask me after Microsoft has put out its next version of Windows. Until then, as with the Beijing air, I'll give this subject a rest!
