Achal Kapoor – See the world through my eyes…..

By Achal Kapoor

Is Microsoft’s new Vista operating system the troubled successor to Windows XP that many people seem to believe it is? Probably not, though after running my Expand All Folders Stress Test, I have my own complaint.

Vista was released in January, after years of delay; “The Wow Starts Now” proclaimed Microsoft’s ads. Upon introduction, Vista got its share of favorable reviews, but there has since been a lot of griping. A reviewer for one big tech Web site ran Vista for a month and pronounced it not ready for the market, although he was immediately flamed by readers as a “Linux fanboy.” A common theme on other tech sites is that too many programs from XP aren’t properly working yet on Vista.

Hence the I-told-you-so comments last week, when Dell announced it would be allowing all its customers to request Windows XP instead of Vista. Some analysts said it was yet more evidence of Vista not catching on, though Dell said it did the same thing during the 2001-2002 transition from Windows 2000 to XP.

Microsoft says there are actually fewer transition issues with Vista than there were at this point with XP. But it admits there is a perception that the opposite is the case. One reason, it says, is that there are so many outlets — blogs and the like — for people who have had a problem with Vista to vent their frustrations, even if that problem isn’t representative of what the average user experiences.

It’s true that Microsoft is blasted for things for which, say, Apple gets a free pass. MacInTouch, a Web site for Apple buffs, has a page listing dozens of compatibility issues with the Mac Tiger operating-system upgrade from 2005. None of those hiccups kept anyone on the site from showering flower petals on Tiger; the same list about Windows would have lead for calls for Bill Gates’s head.

Having said all that, permit me my own bit of venting after spending some time with Vista.

My complaint, like many involving computers, involves something not many others would care about: the apparent inability of Windows to handle very large folders, like those containing thousands of subfolders with tens of thousands of files and hundreds of gigabytes of information.

There is a shortcut in Windows Explorer that lets you expand all subfolders within a folder with a single keystroke, meaning you can then scroll up and down and see everything in the main folder, even items hidden in a sub-sub-sub directory. (This is my preferred way to tend to my music collection.)

The trick works fine for folders of modest size. But on big ones, Windows XP simply chokes. The screen freezes up, the disk drive spins endlessly, Windows Task Manager says the application is “Not Responding.”

This has been the source of considerable personal annoyance over the years, so much so that checking to see if Microsoft had fixed the problem with Vista was the first thing I did.

At first, Vista looked promising. On my command, Windows Explorer started expanding folders. But while the process started fast, it gradually slowed. By the time it got to the Zs — or 3,597 folders later — six minutes had gone by.

At that point, I could scroll up and down in my expanded list of folders, but slowly. The hourglass cursor wouldn’t go away, and I could hear the disk drive spinning, meaning Vista was still on the case. It would take another 10 minutes for both to stop.

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.

This time, the Mac was dealing with data physically stored on the PC, and it was needing to first go through Windows to get access to them. 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. For instance, I could shut down and then restart the Mac in the time it took either version of Windows just to switch off.

After I described my experience to them, Microsoft said I would have had better luck viewing my files in its Media Player software. As for why its file system simply wasn’t more robust in the first place, it said it put its development resources in areas that affect the most people.

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.

Email me at kapoorachal@gmail.com