Vista will never run well on mobile devices? at Micro PC Talk

Vista will never run well on mobile devices?

Vista Windos Experience Index

James Kendrick, of jkOnTheRun just posted a provocative opinion piece about Vista performance on UMPCs. Here’s the gist of the article: In the areas of performance, particularly concerning response time to user actions, Vista stalls and even hangs. It also drains the battery. XP runs pretty well on mobile devices. Why doesn’t Vista? The bottom line is “Vista will not run well on mobile devices in the foreseeable future.”

I have to admit, that I was taken aback by the conclusion, mostly because I’m currently running Vista on my UX390N and it’s running very well. Are my expectations just a lot lower? I don’t think that’s the case. I started out running XP on my UX. My expectations were for at least equivalent performance and responsiveness and, on my system, it that seems to be the case. I use my UX quite a bit during the work day. I wouldn’t tolerate my OS slowing me down to any extent.

So why are my results so different? It’s not because of any optimizing that I’ve done. I’ve done almost none. It may be partly due to some optimizing that Vista does every time you boot. It’s clear that Vista gets better and more responsive over time because of this optimizing. It could be partly due to using the top-of-the-line in terms of both processing and graphics power and memory. Certainly, Vista won’t perform as well on an 800MHz VIA system as it does on my 1.33GHz Intel one. It almost certainly is partly due to keeping my drivers and support software up to date. I do have the latest, fully Vista-compatible drivers for my hardware. I have noticed performance increases when I installed the latest Intel video driver, for instance. Finally, it almost certainly is partly due to the fact that my system has a Solid State Drive, rather than a conventional hard-drive. Vista, even when running optimally, hits the disk more often than XP and, each time it does, the drive has to spin up to speed and seek the data. All that takes time and power that aren’t needed on an SSD. ReadyBoost can help a bit, but I suspect at least some of the performance woes that other people are seeing are due to the hard-drive access.

So place me in the “beg to differ” category. I think Vista already runs well on some mobile devices and will probably get better at so doing. What do you think?

Published by MeanSquare August 28th, 2007 in Micro PC, Software

6 Responses to “Vista will never run well on mobile devices?”

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1 1 Benz145 Aug 28th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

Good point, its probably the slow HDD speeds of UMPC, I think all 1.8″ drives are 4200 RPM. Its strange it seems like most other UMPC sites have never used the UX. I’m not quite sure why, but maybe using a more powerful device would change their minds about vista.
2 2 follick Aug 28th, 2007 at 3:01 pm

How is Vista performance on the UX-380 or UX-280 compared to XP? After all, the only real difference between the 390 and the 380 is the disk. So if the 380 had problems that would certainly point to the hard drive.
3 3 MeanSquare Aug 28th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

The odd thing is that my original SSD UX (a UX91SSD which was damaged in an accident) was running XP. I did the upgrade to Vista myself and I didn’t notice any significant slow-down when I did that. In other words, XP on an SSD machine and Vista on the same SSD machine performed about as well. One thing I will note is that I did a clean install of Vista and then added the UX-specific drivers. Thats a big difference from what you get off the shelf with the UX390N. Sony loads down the unit with a lot of junk-ware, much of which seems as though it were designed to cripple performance.
4 4 MeanSquare Aug 29th, 2007 at 8:45 pm

A few additional thoughts:

I think your level of expectations do figure into the experience somewhat. While I object to the categorical statement that Vista on a UMPC is unstable and stalls out constantly, I can certainly see that even the UX isn’t in competition with the powerhouses used by hardcore gamers. To me it’s a matter of “appropriate technology.” The UX has the power needed to run Vista and the applications I need on a daily basis. It’s even powerful enough to impress me with what it’s capable of doing.

The other thing which I mentioned, but I think deserves another mention is that my UMPC has some cutting-edge technology. Handtops are, by necessity at the cutting edge of technology. Their size makes it necessary to implement technologies that are unnecessary on machines that can be prodigal with power and heat. This is why SSDs showed up in UMPCs first. And it’s that sort of thing that will cause JK to eat his words before too long.

If I had written JK’s statement, I might amend it to say “Vista will never run well on UMPCs unless you’ve got one with current technology”
The UMPCs that comprise the mid-to-low end of the market just don’t have the chops to run Vista (and, as some have noted, even need to be optimized for XP).

New tech is almost always more expensive. Many people who get into UMPCs at the “entry level” will likely have experiences closer to what JK describes because their UMPCs are still using technology that’s at least several years old. One of the things that allowed laptops to enter the mainstream is that they reached a technology point where the experience on entry level systems was actually tolerable. I don’t think we’re there yet with UMPCs.
5 5 MathProfJohnson Aug 31st, 2007 at 11:53 am

Out of my devices, the Q1 is the only one still running XP and that unit hashad dismal performancesince I bought it. I would not have even purchased a UX without the Vista upgrade to enable the tablet tips. I must admit I don’t have much experience with Vista preinstalled on a desktop or laptop AND I have been known to threaten to throw my devices out the window. However like Mean Square, I beg to differ. Maybe I will reload XP on a system just to test it out