I read Lee Gomes’ “Portals” column in The Wall Street Journal today about problems he’s identified with basic file system management in the Windows Vista operating system, and came to the conclusion that he’s foolish for not switching to the Macintosh.
Gomes identified a performance issue in Windows XP; He cannot get his machine to display his music collection in the Windows Explorer because it has almost 3,600 subfolders. XP apparently has problems rendering views of file systems with thousands of nested folders. This scenario causes the Explorer it to consume most of a computer’s CPU resources.
This problem is somewhat improved in Vista; Instead of never completing the display task as is the case in XP, the 3,600 subfolders are rendered in the Vista Explorer in 16 minutes.
If this problem happened to me, and I had the financial resources, I’d switch to an operating system that handled basic operations in a reasonable manner. Gomes has identified such an operating system; It’s Mac OS X. And it’s not like he hasn’t realized this:
…Being the curious sort, I wondered what my experience would be like on a Macintosh. With my home network, I copied the big folder over to a borrowed Apple and used the comparable “Expand All” feature in the Mac Finder. This is when the wow really started: All 3,600 subfolders popped open in 30 seconds.
Both the PC and Mac were recent models with powerful CPUs and plenty of memory. But maybe the Apple just had a faster disk drive. So I used the network to “mount” the PC disk drive on the Mac, without actually copying the folder, and tried the procedure again.
….Even then, it did its folder expansion trick in a little over a minute and a half. So, in working with files and folders, one of a computer’s most basic tasks, the Mac could do in 30 seconds what took Vista at least six minutes for, and which XP couldn’t do at all.
Once you start looking for these Windows vs. Mac speed differences, it’s easy to find other examples….
Lee, can I introduce you to Walter Mossberg? I’ve never met Walt personally (maybe you have, since you work for the same company), but he’s been advocating switching to the Mac for several years.
So why hasn’t Lee Gomes switched to a Mac yet? It seems like he wants to use an operating system that can barely handle his computing needs:
Despite all this, I remain a not terribly unhappy Vista upgrade user. A combination of entropy and familiarity keeps me from bolting. I also have a belief that I’d be sure to find something with the Mac to complain about as well.
Vista will slowly get better and go on to dominate computing, just like its predecessors. That’s one eternal verity. Mac owners feeling aggrieved about same is another.
I don’t know if you noticed this, Lee, but Toyota passed GM in quarterly new car sales in the last quarter. To me this indicates if you keep putting out mediocre products, eventually the grassroots buyers in the U.S. will get the idea and shop someplace else. Microsoft should get the hint, stop worrying so much about matching Apple in UI features, and improve the performance of core functions of its operating systems. [ Paid subscription required to read most articles in The Wall Street Journal ]