Well anyone who buy the performance side know the price to space ratio is not good, in general disk space pretty cheap. considering you can get almost 10x the space for the money (based on my quick newegg search) with a 150 raptor and more compared with SSD. That's the price you pay for wanting the best.
I realize I'm paying a premium for faster storage, but cheap drive space for the masses doesn't give software developers carte blanche to write all the sloppy code they desire.
As a programmer, I know how much time is spent on code optimization. Microsoft has taken a wrong turn somewhere on this issue. Their recent OS's like XP and Vista have been OK when it comes to volatile memory and CPU utilization, but their use of persistent storage is not where it needs to be. XP is not that bad, but one can't say the same for Vista.
There's absolutely no reason for MS to include literally gigabytes of useless drivers within every Vista installation. Likewise, it is beyond wasteful to tie up additional gigabytes of storage with foreign language files for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. for an English-US install. These should either be options during installation, or left on the DVD with the user being prompted for the disc when/if necessary. Another complete waste of storage is the full 15% of your install partition that is dedicated to shadow storage - used to make backup copies of the registry and other Vista files. That's a flat 15%, regardless of how large or small the partition is.
This is why Vista has rightfully earned the reputation as bloatware. It was recklessly coded in terms of how resources are utilized. For a company like MS, that's scandalous, shameful work. Rather than write tight code that gets the most out of every byte of ram, they relied on cheap memory to get people by. Rather than write tight code that gets the most out of every CPU cycle, they relied on Intel and Moore's law to bail them out. Rather than intelligently select files for installation to the hard drive, MS relied on cheap large drives to eat up their bloated footprint. They need to do much better.
I fix Vista by telling relatives who have underpowered computers to run XP, 2K, or Linux.
You cannot make an underpowered system perform well with Vista (anymore than a 486 can run XP). Software has requirements, and Vista's are a lot higher than 2K/XP or Linux.
So very true. Vista only runs well on mid to high level newer hardware. And the sad part is the official specs from MS understate the requirements. I've been in the computer scene for a while now, and I've never seen such a huge gap between OS generations as between XP and Vista, in terms of their requirements. Then again, I've never seen MS release something as bloated as Vista is.
I have to say, though, Vista does run well on sufficiently powered machines. XP will run far better on slow hardware, but on fast hardware XP really has no edge at all.
