So I built a new Windows machine and installed Vista on it. A $500.00 Fry’s special (yah, yah, I could have got the parts cheaper elsewhere). The machine has a Intel DG45ID motherboard, a 3ghz Intel Core Duo processor, and 4gigs of RAM. It has onboard everything. Audio. Video. Cappuccino maker. Air compressor. Flare gun. Everything.

This should be a fast machine. Right? You’d think? Am I nuts to think this?

The experience of Vista itself is fine, I’ve come to grips with the look and feel (after making some tweaks to it), but here’s the thing - performance and sleep both suck chocolate salty balls. What I mean by this is performance ranges from sluggish to horrible (sorry about the juvenile balls reference, btw). Sleep has never worked properly on this thing and I’ve tweaked every Power option and spent a good hour going through the BIOS on my machine. Read that again. I spent an hour in my BIOS. Warning, Bill Gatesenson! Warning Bill Gateseson! (Mike waves arms around and scares all the dogs and small children in the vicinity).

Soooo…..

You can pretty much string together every curse word you know into novel and obscene combinations and you’ll only approximate an infinitesimal portion of the frustration that shot out of my nose (and elsewhere that shall not be mentioned) like coke mixed with pop rocks.

Sir, we’ve gone to defcon 1. Get the keys and standby. We’ve opened the missile silos. Big expensive stuff is steaming and vibrating.

I endured this because I want to get my machine to go to sleep after like twenty minutes. All the way asleep. No fans, no nothing. A tiny trickle away from dead as a doornail. My power bill is shockingly expensive. Trust me, shock would be experienced in its genuine form here. By you, pal. I don’t need another electronic gizmo pegging the power meter. Really. This is not needed.

To give you an idea of what I’m up against, here’s a little story. I was sitting next to it while it was sleeping (because I put the thing to sleep and hour before) and it kept waking up and then it would put itself under again. I was sitting at my Mac Pro, which I had just woken up. Because it was asleep. Ahem.

Anyway, the fans would spin up. Spin down. The monitor power light turned yellow then green then yellow then green. It would click on. Click off. There was loud clicking. Clicking was heard as far away as Juneau Alaska. Alaskans looked around and at each other - all the this clicking is a-boot to drive me a crazy as a bear in honey farm a-boot to overdose on a-boot two tons of honey… Ya’ll.  

I sat there looking at this machine, with my coffee cup half way to my mouth, said mouth quite open and catching the proverbial fly, in utter and complete horror. I voided my bladder and forgot to keep breathing. Ok, that last part didn’t happen, but I was traumatized. 

So what I did in the BIOS was pretty much turn off every goddamn thing that could possibly interfere with the machine sleeping. Same with the system power settings. It helped some. I think. Maybe.

By the way there smarty smart, yes, I installed the latest drivers and BIOS and all the updates. I actually have done this before. Once or twice or thirty times… (Feel free to insert your own banging head on wall joke here.)

The other problem is performance. The machine just goes away sometimes. Right now I’m running Outlook and Windows Live Writer (our Windows Live client applications rock, btw). Vista is in the midst of copying about 200gb of music from a drive on the computer to my server and I’m loosing keystrokes and Outlook stops responding (and turns white) for long periods of time. A-boot thirty seconds or a-boot a minute. And then it comes back.

The thing is staggering along like an intoxicated one legged pirate chasing an intoxicated three legged Yorkshire Terrier. A really mean, doubloon hunting, whale harpooning, piratey Yorky. Hop, sniff, shuffle, hop, yelp, yaaaaaar.

Sigh.

Should I add another 4gb of RAM? Would this help? I don’t think I really need it. Or, rephrased, I don’t think I should need it.

It chaps my hide that I might actually need eight gigabytes of RAM to make this flatulent tub handle like it should. Yes. My hide is chapped. Out back. My caribou and bear skins I’ve stretched out in the sun to dry. I’m making a leathery cape and a cod piece for my wedding if you just have to know there Nosy Nelly.

There, I’m done. For now.

P.S. There are no small children in the vicinity in case you were wondering. Which you weren’t. Until I mentioned it here, and now you’re wondering what’s up with the children thing? What’s he really saying? Just let it go… Just. Let. It. Go.