My one off MVP of the week award has just gone to Richard Urban, I was just about to go to bed but just thought I'd check the Microsoft newsgroups for a few minutes.

Richard Urban was replying to this post:

I have a brand new notebook with a dual core 2.2GHz processor, 2G of memory and a 160G hard drive. It's an HP Pavillion. I turn it on. It takes 45 seconds to display the login prompt. I login. It takes 2 to 3 minutes to display the windows welcome center.

I look at the system configuration and I have dozens of services and startup programs running. I tried to remove all the Norton Anti-virus services and programs. But it still takes 2 minutes to display the windows welcome center. But that means it was taking 60 seconds to load the Norton Anti-virus stuff.

Also, the system is loading 970M of programs and data into memory. That is alot of stuff.

So far my impression of this operating system is that it is too slow. My XP Pro system is far faster and it only has 1G of memory and a single processor.

Also, my daughter just bought an Acer 5100 5674 system at Circuit City. It only has 1G of memory and a 1.6G dual core processor. It is running Vista Home Premium. It takes about 30 seconds to display the login prompt and 1.25 minutes to display the windows welcome center. It is not running Norton Anti-virus.

So I spend all this money on serious hardware, and I am let down by the experience.

Seriously highlighting the fact PC manufacturers need to stop installing so much JUNK on PCs. It has to stop.

Anyway Richard replies with the following:

Your computer has Norton crapware installed. Your daughters doesn't. Your computer runs slow - hers doesn't. And you blame the operating system?

I fail to understand your reasoning that the operating system is at fault!

You already KNOW where the problem lays! Do something about it! Uninstall it.

-includes link to free AV-

You heard the man, uninstall Norton, install some good anti-virus which doesn't ruin your experience. AVG (free), Avast (free) and NOD32 (moneyware) spring to mind.

Here's something I came across, way to start out a blog post.

I hate Windows Vista again today. A lot.

Uhhh huh, why's that?

I put my machine nicely to 'Sleep', only to find that when it woke up, it had helpfully restarted to install some goddamn update, which I can always refuse and reset if I'm actually working on the computer, and lost my work and the browser windows I had open so that I wouldn't forget to blog about those things today.

Oh right, so I'm assuming Windows Vista was set to install updates automatically at 03:00.

OK so let me guess, you're going to say "why the frakking hell did Microsoft do that?"

Well guess what, Windows XP does the same thing.

Ironically somebody posted this in one of the comments:

the more I hear about Windows Vista, the more I'm glad I opted to stay with XP

Heck it was worse with Windows XP because there were about 3 times as many updates, and they weren't all released one day a month, they were released all over the place.

Yet I don't hear anybody complain about Windows XP doing that. Maybe because very few people would put their Windows XP machines to sleep because it was about half as reliable as Windows Vista.

So here Windows Vista checkmates Windows XP on a feature, and thanks to user-stupidity Windows Vista gets another negative story in the blogosphere.

Stupid, frakking operating system. I'm planning on a Mac next time.

Yeah the Macintosh does the same thing, and when you're at the machine it's nagging you even more to install updates and that's only the start of it, on a Macintosh you're looking at multiple reboots to install updates, and that's assuming it doesn't brick the machine.

I never hear any of the Mac users I know complaining about this kind of stupid bullpuckey from their machines.

Well for a start there are about a hundred Windows users for every one Mac OS user, and they have much bigger issues to worry about, like the guy I just linked to, whose machine was bricked thanks to an update and couldn't even reinstall Mac OS. Or how Apple shifting their platform around so much breaks compatibility every few years.