Vistified

Check this out: http://mojaveexperiment.com/

After you watch the intro video all of the videos in the background are available for additional viewing. Funny stuff!

As a related side note, the other day I finally fiddled with my laptop and took a look at what was loading at the start. The cool thing was that windows logs in vista show you the gap between the core load time and the remainder of load time caused by other software appending itself to the startup process. For example, once I pulled all of the iTunes/iPod related stuff from the startup, the laptop booted twice as fast. When I pulled some Adobe stuff out, turned off MS SQL Server on boot up (as a developer it is nice to have it when I need it, but I can click it to start it and don’t need it running all of the time) and pulled a few other offending apps out of the startup, my boot time went from 4 minutes to 1min 30sec. There is more I can do but I haven’t done it yet.

That is clearly an issue with Vista, being able to start a bunch of stuff at boot time. They let people hook into that process, which in some cases is critical (for example, you would want SQL Server to have started on boot up even if you are not logged in if you are running a server.) So technically it is a feature of the system to allow software to do that… BUT it makes no sense that software like, ObjectDock (which creates that mac like docking taskbar for Windows) has to load before delivering the desktop in general.

The smart next move for Microsoft was creating an option for loading services AFTER boot, which means that even though I am starting to fiddle, like open a browser or check my email, the OS can continue to load services. Interestingly enough, my home PC since Vista, Service Pack 1, hasn’t continued to exhibit any buggy behavior. I would say it is the most solid windows OS so far.

So... I am happy to see that Microsoft is finally doing something about the ad campaign leveraged against it by Apple. I have no problems with the Apple ads (I think they are hilarious) or Apple Corp (I like their products well enough having invested, to date, about $800 in iPod devices not to mention the money invested in iTunes downloads.) So this isn't about Apple bashing. It is about seperating the "marketing experience" from the real experience, and I think that will begin to happen now for Vista.

Long time coming.