Yesterday, I had a second chance to build a first impression of Microsoft's Vista.  You might recall I installed Vista on my Dell laptop a couple of months ago and have been using it since.  So far, my experience with Vista has been less than stellar.  I've had about a dozen blue-screens and more than a dozen additional complete freezes that require a hard reboot.  I've had more problems with Vista in 2 months time than more than 5 years of using Windows XP, but I digress. 

Yesterday, I bought my sister a new HP laptop from Costco with Vista pre-installed.  This laptop had amazing specs and for just $999, I was quite jelous of what my sister was getting.  An AMD-based dual core processor, 15” screen, 120GB HD, DVD Burner, 2GB of RAM (the specs are similar to this machine, but our Costco had 2GB models for the same price rather than 1GB).  Plus it had a built-in camera (similar to the MacBook) and even a remote control that slides into the side of the machine.

At work, we have mostly standardized on Dell machines, so I haven't seen HP machines for a long time and this little notbook was impressive.  The fact that it had Vista Premium pre-installed made me even more excited.  Of course, when I dropped off the machine at my sister's house she asked me to set it up for her so she can start using it right away.  I figured, “no problem,” this shouldn't take but just a minute or two.  So I unpacked everything, and now I'm evem more impressed with the HP hardware as it has some cool media touch-buttons for volume and media playback, the remote tucks away on the side of the machine and it has a great overall look and feel to it.  Very nice.  I plugged everything in and turned it on.

“Please wait while Windows prepares your machine for first time use...”

It's an ugly screen that greets you, but hey, it's not a biggie.  It's cool that it's preparing the machine.  I don't want the machine to be surprised thinking “woh! what the hell is going on?”  So go ahead and prepare it.  We'll wait.  Let it know that we're about to start using it and we might even push a few buttons on the keyboard.

So we waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited until finally, after more than 15 minutes, yep, that's 900 seconds for those of you who count startup-times by the second, the machine (are you ready for this?), REBOOTED.  Oh, there was nothing wrong...this was part of the process.  It was preparing the machine.  Finally, Windows Vista was loading up...some better looking graphics this time around as we waited some more.  After another minute or so, it asked for some user information.  OK, now we're talking.  The machine was finally ready for my sister to use, or was it?  “Now it says it's testing my system's performance” my sister mumbled in confusion.  Hmmm...the whole time I couldn't help thinking “couldn't HP have turned on the god damn machine once before packaging it up so that we don't have to be the ones waiting for this stupid thing to prepare?“

Another 15 minutes later and the performance test was over.  All in all, it was approximately 35 minutes after the point I turned on the machine to the point where we were actually using it.  WOW!  More than 2,100 seconds.  Is that the first-time boot experience Microsoft or HP was aiming for?  Who were the idiots who said “yeh, that seems acceptable”?  There was no value from having the user go through this waiting process while the machine prepares, except to completely kill the enthusiasm that one might have for using their brand new computer for the first time.

I have to say, so far, Vista has been a major disapointment.