I had to wipe out my HDD to reinstall the OS over the weekend. Vista was getting painfully slow after using it for a year and a half, plus, I ran out of HDD space! I consider myself a pretty clean PC user: aside from those “factory default” software, I usually only install what I need. Turns out that didn’t really matter. For some reason, the system won’t stop writing to the HDD (I assumed it was for backup purposes) and last Saturday, I had a little under 8 GB of free HDD space left — the little space indicator bar on my C: drive actually turned red. So I decided to go back to XP.
Anyway, as I was working on my laptop, two unrelated questions crossed my mind.
Question #1: How does Microsoft make such a bad product in Vista and not do anything about it?
Sure, people have told me that 64 bit version of Vista is way better than my 32bit version: more stable, faster, whatever. But come on, with all the extremely smart and talented people who work at Microsoft, shouldn’t they have realized by now that Vista is crappy? I guess the inflexibility of a multi-billion dollar enterprise really shows here. Also, I think the little bit of the market share they are going to lose over Vista doesn’t compare to the cost of actually changing it and making it better. Perhaps after numerous meetings, they concluded that the most cost-efficient method was to not make any major improvements. How sad.
On a separate note, I also find it pretty amusing when I was buying my laptop, I had the option to pay extra money to downgrade to Windows XP.
Question #2: How easy would it be to upgrade/reinstall/switch PC operating systems 3 years from now?
I was surprised by how little software I needed after I wiped clean my HDD. I even made a list to be prepared: Firefox, Chrome, AVG, Jing, Picasa, MSN Messenger, Notepad++, iTunes, DVD player, all of which could be downloaded for free. Of course I had to backup some personal data on an external HDD, but that didn’t take very long either. With the help of MozBackup, I even kept all of my browsing history/bookmarks/cache/etc. I have also decided to stop using MS Office and switch to the free OpenOffice.
Things I didn’t have to worry about include: my blog and drafts (on Google Docs), my web projects, Emails, Facebook, MSN Messenger, and Twitter.
The biggest challenge was getting up-to-date drivers for my system, and that was solved by downloading Lenovo’s ThinkVantage system update software which automatically detects what’s needed and installs them.
My point is, with Google’s Chrome OS just around the corner and Apple joining the cloud computing game, within a few years, isn’t it very possible to have the option to do a fast and clean OS upgrade or re-installation with just one click of the mouse, while not having to worry about losing any of your data? Wouldn’t it be great to have your newly purchased PC act exactly like your old system, except faster and better, without you having to do anything? People could even have different profiles saved for work, home, or entertainment and use them on different systems, with connected and shared data. The possibilities are just endless.
As for now, I am happy with my blazing fast Windows XP based laplop and my newly found extra HDD space.
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