So far I have been relatively fortunate and managed to steer clear of Vista both at work ( where requirements to run applications that do not work with IE 7 mean Vista is a no go zone ) and at home. Apart from a couple of weekends spent recently helping an uncle setup a new Packard Bell PC that came with Vista pre-installed and a few attempts to install the early betas of Vista my knowledge of Microsofts latest OS has been acquired virtually entirely through media and web reviews and commentaries.

This all changed last weekend though when I decided I would take a brand new HP 2710p Tablet PC which had just been delivered to work, home to have a play with. The 2710p is HPs latest tablet which replaces the older tc4400. It is slim, silver and very sleek and certainly surpasses the tc4400 and the Toshiba tablets as far as style is concerned. In line with current trends in reducing carbon footprints the laptop came in a fairly small box with only minimal packaging, a power lead and a system restore CD. I have to admit I was quite looking forward to seeing what Vista was like on a tablet, and so set to the task of setting it up.

Now since switching to Mac a few years ago I think I have become a little spoilt as regards setting up new machines. Anyone who has ever unboxed and powered up a new Mac will know that the whole process takes no more than about 10-15 minutes and is so simple your 6 year old child could literally do it. I suppose I was half expecting the job of setting up Vista to be at least comparable to this. Clearly I was wrong.

Switching on the 2710p was the first trick. The power switch located at the front of the machine is a small silver block that has to be slid to the right to switch the machine on. Unfortunately the switch is quite awkwardly positioned and pretty stiff. The same goes for the switch to release the screen, in fact it is literally a two handed job to push this catch to the right and lift the lid at the same time.

Once powered up and open for business the process of setting up Vista began, and what a process it was! From initial selection of 32bit or 64bit variants of the OS ( to which there was no accompanying explanation of the pros and cons of each selection ) to the final restart after install took what seemed like an age. I did not time it as I wasn’t expecting it to be such an extended task, but it was easily an hour and a half, possibly longer. Then again after initial login the machine went away for a further session of disk whirring whilst additional software was installed ( presumably the Symantec suite which comes bundled with the machine ). From start to where I was able to actually login must have taken over 3 hours ! How can this be justified on a brand new machine straight from the supplier ?

Once I had gotten over this hurdle I thought I should at least be able to get on and evaluate what Vista was like, but that wasn’t to be either. The problem you see is that this machine was supplied as standard with 1Gb of RAM. Once booted around 900Mb of that is immediately grabbed by the OS, leaving the poor machine virtually crippled whilst it pages back and forth from disk. In fact once logged in the hard disk continued to clatter away virtually continuously even when there were no apps loaded. I had intended to install Office 2007 to see how that worked with Vista but the way the machine was limping along I decided that would be a fruitless thing to do. Quite literally this shiny new tablet PC felt like a 10 year old Pentium trying to run Windows XP.

Quite how HP can ship a PC in this state is beyond me. Any customer that goes through the pain of setting these machines up to be left with a laptop that runs so appallingly is almost certainly going to think twice about buying from them again. Now I know that you could argue that as a purchaser of a Vista machine I should know that I need to spec at least 2Gb of RAM, but the reality is most customer do not know this and they depend on the company supplying the hardware to spec the components to perform as required. Are HP purposely trying to encourage users to switch back to XP ? If not why don’t they spec their PC’s with adequate memory as standard to run Vista ? The extra cost to HP to include 2Gb instead of 1Gb must surely be only a few UKP ?

The alternative conclusion that customers may come to when they experience this, especially if they have an older Windows XP machine to compare to, is that Vista is the culprit. Certainly the first thing I did with this machine when I returned to work on Monday was to get it prepared to be “upgraded” to Windows XP Tablet Edition! This movement towards reloading XP is growing fast and is without doubt a part of the drive towards consumers switching to OS X and Macs. From my personal experience over the last 12 months I have seen at least 6 friends and relatives move to Mac and not one of them has regretted it or would ever go back to Windows.

I think Microsoft have some serious re-thinking to do. This is a view shared by a growing number of industry trend setters. John C Dvorak covers this very topic in his recent post entitled The Vista Death Watch.

Certainly makes you glad you switched don’t it ?