I've come to really like and appreciate Ed Bott, and here's a typical example of why: Not only does this article actually help Vista owners in general, it includes a very necessary call-out to Walt Mossberg, who baldfacedly promotes all things Apple and makes spurious complaints about Microsoft at the drop of a hat. Bravo, Ed. And shame on the Mossman. Again.
Here we go again.
The wise old men of mainstream tech journalism are once again repeating the conventional wisdom that Vista is slow to start up and slow to shut down. They’re wrong.
In this post, I’ll explain why they’re wrong and show you how you can fix the problem if you encounter a slow startup.
The latest to repeat this accusation is the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, who slipped this doozy in his review of Leopard:
Even though I had cleared out all of the useless trial software Sony had placed on the Vaio, it still started up painfully slowly compared with the Leopard laptop ... It took the Vista machine nearly two minutes to perform a cold start and be ready to run, including connecting to my wireless network. The Leopard laptop was up, running and connected to the network in 38 seconds.
Three minutes to start up? This is the same crappy Sony notebook that Mossberg was complaining about back in April, and it seems downright unfair to pick this one sluggish machine and continue using it as the benchmark. But whatever. Walt, if you’re really interested in fixing this machine’s slow startup times, keep reading. Or call me and I’ll help walk you through it.
Ah ha ha. Excellent. Read the whole article. Lots of good advice. For you and Walt.
And for the record: Once again, the conventional wisdom about Vista is wrong. I've certainly never experienced slow system boot times, but it's interesting to me how quickly and easily people just accept this stuff as fact.