Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all

March 04, 2006 @ 11:53 am

So I installed Vista yesterday on a second machine, mainly because I want to take a closer look at IIS7 and I haven't been able to get LongHorn Server loaded on this same machine due to some partion access problems. Apparently this version of Vista has the same full blown version of IIS7 in it that Server does.

The first thing I noticed is how slow everything is. The installer ran for about 2 hours to get through the install. It seems the bottle necks is disk access. Granted the process didn't prompt at all except for choosing the partition and putting in the registration key but still. This machine has large and fast hard disk that is no problem running XP.

Same with network performance – I copied two largish folders (my Development folder and a utility tools folder) from my laptop. These folders make up maybe 100 megs of data, but it took well over 5 minutes to copy. Ouch. Worse Windows still aborts a file transfer if it runs into a file that is locked or otherwise can't be copied. I had a projects open in VS when I copied files and Windows just stopped – no message, just no files copied and abort in the middle of the copy. Ouch. Call that a nasty bug <g> - you never know what you're missing. But there's a nice flashy animate – woo hoo.

From a usability point of view everything is really, really sluggish too. My machine isn't a speed demon (this is a backup test server machine) but it's a 2.4ghz P4, with 2 gigs and a fast 7200rpm hard disk (but a generic video card). Everything crawls badly. You sit and wait for windows to open, and even while all this slowness is going on there many drawing imperfections like lack of screen refreshes and trailing content. I'm running in the lowly – "your hardware sucks" – video mode. The machine speed ratings are all 6-8 or so, except for the video card which is one with the overall machine rating 1. I don't know what that means (help sure doesn't help), but I think that's not good <g>. So if you don't have a decent video card the machine rating immediately goes to the dump. Anybody have any advice on a decent cheap video card that will work with the advanced Vista video features? I'm not looking to run games on this machine - just trying to get on with work...

Then there are the security dialogs. Ah yes, now we're making progress: Ask users on EVERY program you launch that isn't signed whether they want to elevate permissions. Uh huh, this is going to work REAL WELL. We know how well that worked with unsigned ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer – so well that even Microsoft isn't signing most of its own ActiveX controls. Give too many warnings that are not quite reasonable and people will never read the dialogs and just click them anyway… I know I started doing that in the short use I've had on Vista.

So my goal has been to try to run some existing Web apps under IIS 7 so I ran a configuration utility I use with most of my Web apps to configure the virtual, set permissions etc. It's a small .NET utility and I was unable to run it even with an override. As soon as it accessed the DirectoryServices message store (for IIS Web Site information – which likely won't work anyway) I got a security violation that I couldn't override even as an administrator.

Anyway, the issue is that even if you are logged in as Administrator, you're not getting Adminstrator rights. There's a way to turn this feature off by the way:

Run gpEdit.msc (from the Run box – Windows – R in case you can't find it – I couldn't)

Go to: Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | Local Policies | Security Options

User Account Control: Run all users including Administrators as standard users - Disable

User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt - No Prompt

Log Off and log back on once you've set that

Now you normally don't want to do this but since my primary goal is to check out IIS and related tools I don't want to be clicking this silly dialog every ten seconds.

With this set I was able to run my app, but it failed anyway because IIS 7 doesn't (not yet at least) support the ADSI interfaces for configuration I presume. The focus of the IIS7 configuration will be the WMI interfaces instead - which admittedly look a lot more logical, but of course require reworking of lots of code that has been working since IIS 4.

Back to the security thingy in Vista and Longhorn Server.

Security is good, but you know this kinda shit is just stupid. It's a typical Microsoft knee jerk reaction to a problem they got reamed on. Oh we had problems with security so now lets jank it down so much using a computer is going to be a fucking drag for everybody even if they know what they're doing. Seriously the arrogance of the above setting is pretty amazing. "We know better than you, that when you're logged in as an Adminstrator, you don't really want to be an Adminstrator. Trust us." Riiight.

The solution to this problem is to not automatically make a new user an Administrator in the first place. As a new user that installed the machine I get added to the Administrator group. But I have no Adminstrator rights really. So why put me there in the first place?

I don't get it… Too much security is as bad as no security, as warnings will get ignored or people find ways to elevate their rights to get around the overly tight setup. But I guess this is Microsoft making sure – 'hey we warned you' to cover their ass. I'm not sure but somehow I don't think that Mac users see a security dialog everytime they run an application that might be accessing some system resources.

On an design level I also think that one characteristic of Vista really sticks out - it's freaking UGLY. I know I'm running in scumbag video mode, but the default color scheme is the most bland thing I've ever seen. The form interface is ugly - it just all looks 'cheap'. Everything is really blocky, hogging screen real estate, but the colors of dialogs etc. are all really washed out. Even running in a 'classic' XP blue scheme looks like you're ready to head out to Prozac land. There's very little color in the UI and it all looks really washed out because of all the shading. Remove a little more color and you might as well run in two color mode or black and white - really in shades of grey. From the screen shots of seen of the full on Aero Glass it doesn't look much better in that respect other than things bouncing around and animating everything.

I'm sure there are many improvements under the hood and I see the need for them, but as a first time impression of Vista there's not much there that makes you think - Wow - now this is cool. Somehow after all these years and all the hoopla Microsoft has gone through it seems like a pretty big downer. Then again, XP felt the same way - but it wasn't really a major upgrade to Win2000 either - not as major as Vista's internal changes.

All that said this build is much better than any previous Vista or LongHorn builds which were all but unusable due to sluggish performance. This version is slow but borderline usable. I do tend to think that some of the slowness is due to the graphics card or lack thereof. It's going to take some serious hardware to run Vista and somehow I don't think upgrading to it with anything but the current latest hardware is going to be a fun experience for anyone. I suppose this is nothing much new with OS upgrades...

This brings back memories of Windows 2.x and 3.x which were way ahead of the typical hardware of the day and as a result were dog slow. It also meant that adoption of those took a long time as the computer base slowly changed. I suspect Microsoft is going to spend a lot of time trying to optimize Vista so that it does run better on lowlier machines... we can only hope.

Well onwards and upwards to playing around with IIS 7. This should prove a little more positive of an experience I hope.

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re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Brian Vander Plaats March 04, 2006 @ 6:05 pm

I'm already fed up with the present state of MS "Security" in XP & office apps. If a whole new OS release doesn't fix these problems...

If "signed" applications are the route MS is taking, where can I find a plain, no-nonsense guide on how to do this? Back when MS started locking down outlook, I spend a month off an on trying to track down a workaround that didn't tick off my System Adminstrators, but finally gave up, and went to SMTP completely.

To me a simple approach would be a centralized list of programs, maintained on the local PC (home use) or a domain, assigning a unique key for every program, which the program asks for when installed. Then when the program runs, it passes the key to windows, and windows runs the program if it is "approved"

But if you are going to tell me I need to register my program with some external authority, pay some fee...

As for the new vista looks, I'm pretty disappointed that MS went for the extreme graphics route. Other than look "cool", how will this really enhance the computing experience? What I see happening is the typical office computer price going up $100 to accommodate a fast video card, which almost certainly requires a noisy fan. But hey, at least that accounting app will have pretty edges over it's monocolor cyan background...

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by steve March 04, 2006 @ 8:40 pm

After reading your post I have diagnosed your attitude as one common to those spending too many hours installing MS OSes. I used to get this myself until I got really good at W2K installs that don't break and so I refuse to budge (am currently looking for a new career as one day the MS police will take my machine away).

I think MS has been in collusion with hardware manufacturers for years: make an OS and apps that run really slow unless you get hardware that has been released within the last 3-6 months. Hey, it feeds the economy....

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Joel Leach March 05, 2006 @ 4:56 am

My experience is from gaming only, but if you need an AGP card, the NVidia Geforce 6800GS is currently the best value IMO. The ATI x850XT is good as well, but it costs more unless you can find a good deal. The latest and greatest cards are all PCI Express, but you'll get good performance from these two. Make sure you have a good enough power supply to run.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814143045

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Rick Strahl March 05, 2006 @ 1:30 pm

Thanks Joel,

Still a bit more than I'd like to spend. Any idea how far back you can go before cards start being crappy <g>. I think the main requirement is that they need to support DirectX 9 and 128mb video (actually 64MB required).

I was looking over at ZipZoomFly and there are a few GEForce 6200 clones that run under $100.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=324561

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=324548

I haven't done any research and frankly I'm not too concerned about super high performance since I'm not going to be playing games. Anything's gotta be better than stock video cards, right?

According to nVidia all the 6000 series are supported by Vista.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Rick Strahl March 05, 2006 @ 1:37 pm

Steve,

Yeah, I spend a lot of time installing shit - no doubt about it. But nothing will make me go back to Windows 2000 and the instability that went with it. I've been very happy with Windows 2003 server until recently when I had start using XP on my laptop because the drivers wouldn't work. XP is Ok too once you turn off all the crap that XP automatically installs and runs.

Aside from that I find that unless I rebuild my machines once a year anyway they become to slow to use with all the stuff built up who knows where. Performance is always on a steady downhill slide after a new install.

I wouldn't be bothering with Vista at this point if it wasn't for IIS7, but while I'm there I figure I might as well try to make the most of it.

Code bloat and slow software is prelevant everywhere in applications. Almost all of the mainstream applications these days are overloaded pigs and many, many times slower than previous versions.

I've written here about Acrobat, QuickBooks and even things as simple as MusicPlayers that want to use 50-60 megs of memory to run - and then like molasses at that. Nobody seems to care about performance anymore except gamers.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by steve March 05, 2006 @ 2:52 pm

Rick -- I agree with you on this, and you need to be fighting the good fight for what you do.

I have deep-seated personal issues that kick in whenever my PC doesn't behave perfectly, every time, so I tend to find a "happy place" and stay put.

I'll probably buy a new PC just to install Windows 2003 server, and keep this one on W2K just because it works great and I don't want to mess it up.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Craig Boyd March 06, 2006 @ 12:20 am

Rick,

Good blog post - some of your thoughts mirror my own, though Vista and apps run slightly faster at this end. A few comments...

When you've changed the settings in gpedit.msc (secpol) you don't have to logoff and back on. Just issue "gpupdate /force". Great tip by the way, though we're still not really Administrators on Vista (lots of stuff we don't own and can't take ownership of - MS needs to change that cause it is giving me an excedrin size headache).

If you want a program to Run as administrator every time it is executed, go to the properties of the executable, Compatibility tab, privelege level, and then check the "Run this program as an administrator" check box.

Finally, I had problems finding RUN as well when I installed my first CTP of Vista. RUN is in Accessories of all places now, or you can just kick it off by typing "run" into the start menu search box. I ended up pinning the RUN shortcut to my start menu so I didn't have to do all that clicking to get to it.

Now if I could just figure out how to get enough permissions so that when VS2005 is building a C++ COM dll it can actually register it. Wasn't a problem in Vista 5270, but 5308 has managed to mess this up. Vista needs a Staples Easy Button that I can push to get control of my machine back. With Vista, an Administrator isn't an Administrator even with the changes in security policies.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Martin Brice March 06, 2006 @ 4:14 am

I just read the one part of your posting that disturbs me. You said Vista was sluggish on a slow machine? A "2.4ghz P4, with 2 gigs and a fast 7200rpm " is a slow machine? Man, I would love to work for your company! That's a pretty average machine where I come from. Not to knock you, no, that's not the point. The point is, Vista can't be slow on that type of machine, a 2.4G machine cannot and should not be considered a slow machine IMHO!

Dell.ca's mainstream box is just a 2.8G machine, not much of a difference! MS wants to force people to upgrade their HW for a $100 OS? I just soured on Vista! :<

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Paul Rec March 06, 2006 @ 6:40 am

Yikes - looks like even more security fun (make that BS).

Good post - I now feel much better about my rant a couple of days ago...

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/4619.aspx#4631

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Rick Strahl March 06, 2006 @ 10:20 am

Martin,

My 2.4ghz machine is over 2 years old. Part of the confusion here is the processor perf changes that have occurred over the last couple of years. Tihs is an original P4 2.4ghz, without any enhancements.

And yes it is very very slow. Compared to XP which flies on the same machine, everything drags badly.

But at the same time I wouldn't worry about that too much - the code is likely not optimized and given that Microsoft has never shipped an optimized preview or beta build of anything I can remember I'm going to guess that this will get better. Still to see that much performance difference is a disturbing experience and certainly not one that will make you want to rush out and into it.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Martin Brice March 08, 2006 @ 3:39 am

re still...
I agree! I'm a bit concerned cause I have one of those older P4 2.8Ghz machines and I just expected it would fly with Vista. Reading your posting isn't very reassuing. Oh, please don't misunderstand me (or other readers), I'm not diss'n you, rather, I'm thankful for the info and have to keep this in the back of my mind when/if I get a copy of it to "play with." I thank you for the information!

re MS has never shipped optimized preview
Ya, I understand that. It's just bothersome that you need premium machines just to get by with the new OS. Didn't IBM try that crap a few years ago? What was that OS called? OH ya, OS/NOT!!!!!!! :<

Thanks for the heads up, have a good week.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by scottgu March 09, 2006 @ 10:05 am

One thing to keep in mind is what drivers you have installed, and what quality they are at.

OS performance is typically dicated by those more than anything (if you've ever run XP using the standard VGA driver that ships built-in you'll know how slow it crawls). My experiences with Vista depend a lot on whether optimized video+disk drivers are working and in the build -- much more so than CPU speed.

Device manufacturers are the ones that make the drivers -- and a lot of them don't have up to date ones yet. This will get much better in the months leading up to launch.

Hope this helps,

Scott

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Dave Totzke April 21, 2006 @ 10:21 am

I can echo scottgu's comments. I have a brand shiny new AMD Athlon X2 dual core with 2 gigs RAM and two Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM drives striped for the system. With the wrong drivers installed even this monster will crawl.

I have an ATI All-in-Wonder X800 AGP video card that serves me very nicely. Avoid the latest drivers from ATI for 5308 as they suck. The ones that ship with 5308 work very nicely out of the box. Your assumption is correct in that the important thing is hardware support for DirectX 9.

I've found 5308 to be very stable considering it's a CTP and not a true Beta quality build. So far no smoke :)

cheers.
Dave

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Rick Strahl April 21, 2006 @ 10:42 am

Dave, it's better with decent video drivers, but still pretty sluggish. I'm finding though that different machines with similar perf specs can produce quite different results. I have an old laptop that I installed Vista on and it actually runs pretty good on that. On the desktop - now updated even with a better Vista supported video card - it still is slow.

Then there's the whole debacle of running in Virtual PC. I have one machine ( a new Dual Core Laptop ) that will not install Vista at all - just bombs. It won't install raw from the USB drive either and just blue screens when it boots into WIndows.

Very discouraging all of this.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Dave Totzke April 22, 2006 @ 6:39 am

Bummer.

I also have a 1.2 TB drive array that I can't use with Vista as Promise has not published any drivers at all for my controller, or any of their controllers for that matter, yet.

I just noticed that there is a new Vista build available. 5365. I'm downloading it now. (4+ GB!!) Perhaps you'll have better luck with that one.

There is also an indexing service that runs in Vista. I think it's called Microsoft Search Service or something similar in the Services MMC plugin. I've heard from many that killing that service can improve performance. Seems that right now it sucks as bad as the old MS Office FindFast thing did years ago. Your mileage may vary.

dave

Microsoft Vista's Endless Security Warnings
by Schneier on Security April 24, 2006 @ 8:47 am

Paul Thurrott has posted an excellent essay on the problems with Windows Vista. Most interesting to me is how they implement UAP: User Account Protection: Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where...

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by CK May 02, 2006 @ 2:40 pm

Very good article. I am having problems and I hope that some of this information would help. But even if not, I would I also feel that this is too much security. As someone has said, "Vista users will have to hire a consultant to get Vista going".
The problems I am seeing start with not being able to run secpol.msc (crashes). In addition and most likely related, the Microsoft Transfer Manager crashes. I asked for help to the right source, only to be told to read the NG FAQs. And this is all I hope I am permitted to comment about. There is much more I could say about arrogance, but I will not say it.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Droopie May 08, 2006 @ 11:40 am

Completely agree. Microsoft kills its product at the very beginning by releasing this whacky software. If I were to decide on the basis of 5308, I would never budge from my current system.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Cowbell June 10, 2006 @ 10:53 am

5308 is a far cry from 5384.4 however. try something a little newer than the February CTP FFS

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by kfink June 12, 2006 @ 8:26 am

Don't even bother upgradding your video card... God so bloody slow even on my 6800gt... Doom 3 can pull out 60fps at 1920x1200 on my system... Windows vista ... about 5. I've never encountered anything so slow or frustrating in my life (and I've installed XP on P2 266 with 128mb of ram). Honestly, you think it couldn't be much slower than XP, you have no idea :(. Even file transfers are slow (20.1mb/s from 7200rpm drive to sata raid (dual 7200rpm).. should be around 60mb/s).

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Florin July 07, 2006 @ 6:47 am

The confirmation dialog (or dialogue?) when executing a program seems secure at first, but when you're planning to use your computer daily as a power user, it gets really annoying!!! I have thought - why can't they make a logical OS that lets you run the programs YOU execute. Other programs that run by themselves may be an exception and a good thing too.
I was logged on once and i switched to get to another user and it seemed more complicated than I thought. In Windows XP you always had all the names you could log on by. Isn't it obvious that if you switch user, you want to log on another user? Am I making sense here? But no, you have to press the "switch user" button which makes it just crap. Anyway, so after I logged on the other user.... guess what. The whole OS just crashed (I hope that was a bug and not some other problem). I haven't experienced a whole OS (blue screen) crash since I last used my old laptop. So, from then, I just installed Windows XP again and I'm planning to get Vista when it comes out "bug-free". I completely agree with each and every one of your comments. The BETA version was supposed to be the "Ultimate Version" that has everything. No everything for me, because I saw that in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties, the "Flip 3D" button was disabled. I wasn't able to have Aero (or maybe I had to go through all the trouble to change it) and my System Rating, as I recall, was rated as 1.
I am really disappointed at MS. They have gone from a very good position to the very bottom. They have excited people about all the roumours that it is more "clear" and fast and easy to use, but when people got it, I'm sure they were really diappointed (at least most of them).

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Eddie Hulme July 14, 2006 @ 2:46 pm

I have an AMD Athlon 64
2 gig memory
256 meg nvidea geoforce 6600GT
180 gig hd, 7200

The machine rocks in XP 32 bit and 64 bit.

With the beta 2 cust preview it and having cleaned out non compatibilities it took over 3 hours to upgrade from 32 bit xp to 32 bit ultimate vista.

from a cold boot to the menu - through preparing desktop takes 7 minutes of constant disk activity. If i cant speed this up i will uninstall and wait for a newer faster preview.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by leigh September 13, 2006 @ 9:45 am

I have installed the newest version of vista and i am having nothing but problems.Granted i only have an athlon xp 2800 cpu and a pretty old video card(ti4200)and an abit nf-7 board.After over an hour installing it i just couldnt get it to do anything.It just kept freezing up and wouldnt let me recover like xp.If this is how things are going to be than i will stick with xp till they refine things a little better.I pity anyone trying to use it on a slower machine than mine.

Another wwHoverPanel Control update - Rick Strahl's Web Log
by Rick Strahl's Web Log November 12, 2006 @ 9:23 am

I've posted another update to the wwHoverPanel ASP.NET control over the weekend that addresses some of the display quirks when adjusting the window position due to scroll off.

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by Sarah November 23, 2006 @ 11:25 am

Total disappointment, :o(

P4 3.4G, Asus P5B Delux Motherboard, ATI 1300 etc etc, and vista is still sluggish. Though my main complaint is the security issues, something as simple as moving a file into a folder [drop & drag] is constantly asking me to seek permission. I have a billion photo's to sift through and organise, but this is making it twice as long.

I've tried the work around, and unfortunately it didn't work, it's true....As you say even though I seem to appear as an administrator, I'm far from it.

I'm going back to XP, there's nothing that breathtaking in vista to hold me, a game I've been playing for years will not be made for vista, only the begining, no doubt of many compatibility issues.

I may consider returning to it after a year or so of it's release, maybe when MS decide to stop sitting on the fence and actually solve some of these issues instead of washing their hands of it all the time..

Better the devil you know?? [XP]

ATPM 12.06 - Bloggable: Don’t Look Back
by ATPM - About This Particular Macintosh November 24, 2006 @ 12:52 pm

Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions: Microsoft Vista - Impressions after Week 1
by Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions December 18, 2006 @ 5:48 am

Vista Administrator Access Howto: « Williamo’s Blog…
by Comments on: Vista Administrator Access Howto: January 08, 2007 @ 2:24 pm

Coding Horror: Windows Vista: Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs
by Coding Horror January 27, 2007 @ 8:19 am

re: Windows Vista on slowish machine - not much fun at all
by John March 14, 2007 @ 11:05 pm

Well I just recently rented a vista laptop(. This baby is slow as hell and doesn't understand new drivers installed into it all. I do understand many companies have not updated to making drivers for vista. But my bluetooth,data cable,mouse,sync all don't work with vista. I know somewhat of computers. All of these devices were very easy to use on xp bluetooth etc works very easily on my good xp computer. From this experience I am not buying vista for another 3 years.

Windows Vista on a fast machine - some fun
by AppDev May 09, 2007 @ 12:39 pm

Rick --

Many thanks for the condensed tips and tricks. We got a 3GHz dual core 2GB and immediately disabled the admin prompts and turned off the animations. With those changes, performance is brisk, but we are annoyed as the Win 95-XP features dropped: the Up button in Windows Explorer, Find Computer in a workgroup, the Printers icon in the Start menu. Maybe that's what the NY Times meant calling it Vista Minus. Content indexing seems to be the main plus, limited though it is. Is there anything else?