Sunday, August 26, 2007

Can Vista work on the UMPC? I Think So!

Thanks to CTitanic (Tablet PC MVP Frank Garcia) at Ultra-Mobile PC Tips, I'm aware of jkOnTheRun's James Kendrick's post disputing Windows Vista's suitability for Ultra-Mobile PCs  and Ultranauts' Mark's response to JK.  A lot of machines have touched James' hands, and nothing less than a Core 2 Duo has provided him with a satisfactory Vista experience. With new Ultra-Mobiles starting to ship with 600 MHz and 800 MHz processors, those of us carrying UMPCs can only dream about one day having even Core Solo in the palms of our hands.

As much as I respect James' superior mobile device knowledge, and despite what I've said before about my 900 MHz UMPC's Vista performance issues and the questionable decision to use processors with slower clock speeds than are found 1st-generation devices, I cannot entirely agree with Frank's fellow Tablet MVP. Naturally, I don't expect any machine equipped with a 600 MHz processor to do well with Vista, but I want to see one of the A110 (800 MHz) devices at work before I pass final judgement on those; from what I've learned from usertests and talking with an Intel rep, with their faster bus speeds and L2 cache, I might find one of them might actually serve me better than my R2H. In addition to that, though I am a demanding user, I have seen the kind of performance I desire from a couple of the little guys. The VIA-enabled Amtek T770 is one of them; I really enjoyed using Vista on that one (if only it had a heavy touchscreen!). The Fujitsu LifeBook P1610, while not technically a UMPC by Microsoft's definition, did just fine with Vista, and it has a 1.2GHz Core Solo processor.

This post was written from Vista using my Asus R2H Ultra-Mobile. Look, ma, no keyboard!

 

 

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2 comments:

ctitanic said...

Well, I can tell you for fact (check these peformance tests) that any A110 will perform faster than the old R2H Celeron without any Cache. That's a fact, like 2+2=4

MiniMage said...

Thanks for the confirmation. Unfortunately, I've got Macitis right now, so I may have to wait for the Shift's generation 2.