Further Adventures With the UX300

A comment from supper happy jen (who has lots to be happy about) that she is running XP, and Jan-Piet's blog for today (which directed me to something from the FAA so there is some aviation in here) that he won't upgrade if he can avoid it has prompted me to comment on my personal experience with Vista so far. First some background.

At work I use *nix based operating systems exclusively because I work in embeded development, application development, data trasportation and network security. At home I use Windows XP 99% of the time, mainly because, at home, I don't want to do development. Linux desktop applications are getting better, but in my opinion still lag behind XP in ease of use and integration, sad as that is to say. Having a penquin for a mascot doesn't seem to make much difference Jen.

I have hear/read some good and lots bad about Vista. The UX300 may not be the best platform to test drive Vista on, but it has a faster CPU, more memory and a larger disk drive than my laptop which runs XP Pro and Linux so I think it is. The first thing I notice is that Vista is slow, and the disk drive is awlays active. It is really cool to be able to walk around with a 1.33GHz computer in the palm of your hand, but chain Vista to its leg and it just gets frustrating. In each computer I've purchased in the last ten years it seems that all the increased computing performance goes to powering the user interface. Vista on the UX300 is this trend gone wild. I'm afraid that my next personal computer purchase is going to be a Mac.

There is also something different about the Vista NTFS file system from previous Windows implimentations. I don't know if this is causing my problems, but when I try to install openSUSE (which uses the same grub boot loader as Fedora, something happens to the Vista partition that prevents it from booting. However using a disk partition editor to set the Vista partition to active seems to solve the problem. I don't know why open source installations insist on playing with the partition table active flag when they don't use it, but this would certainly be a barrier to any non-technical user who was moving cautiously from the Microsoft Camp. Another reason to get a Mac?

Edit:
It seems that openSUSE is using the active partition flag. So to dual boot Vista and openSUSE one must configure grub to install on the Master Boot Record and set the Vista partition to active. This is what Fedora does.