After reading this article on Cnet, I have to completely agree with Larry on his observation of his Windows XP machine. Not only does my corporate issued late model IBM Thinkpad running Windows XP takes forever to boot up, it also suffers from not being able to shut down properly. Since it is a laptop, my alternative to bypass the wait is to just close the lid and put it into hibernate. At least that shaves off about 3 minutes wait time for me. Its quite embarassing when I use my laptop to help troubleshoot the network and if I had to reboot; it’ll take approximately five whole minutes before I can start working my magical tech skills.
As for the shut down problem, I hardly experience that since I almost never turn the damn machine off to begin with. However, reboots are nightmare as it gets stuck on the “Windows is properly shutting down” screen. Seriously, how proper does it need to shut down if I actually manually end task for all my programs? Impatient as I can get at times, I just hold onto the power at times to completely shut it down. I don’t care, at times, I seriously wished the laptop did crash and die so they can issue me another laptop which is probably going to be at least 3 years old.
I can’t say much for Windows Vista as I completely bypassed that operating system like I did for Windows Millenium. But you must wonder, what exactly is going on during the shut down sequence for it to take so darn long. Is it a hardware problem? As mentioned in the CNet artilce, perhaps other programs that were running are having problems closing out. However, if Windows, the operating system, is shutting down, shouldn’t it be able to? Doesn’t seem very efficient to me and quite weak in my opinion of its the operating system thats supposedly managing all the other programs right?
I’m in the same boat as everyone else, anticipating Windows 7 and hoping it will be great. But til then, I’ll enjoy using my Hack OS X.