ON MORE MAC vs. WINDOWS REVIEWS

BELIEVE IT OR NOT

Here's a review on Windows Vista by the Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes, where despite his best efforts, he still ends sounding like a Mac commercial.  He discusses a Windows pet peeve that I've shared for a long time as well:

"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...

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...

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."

He goes on with this comparison, even getting the Mac to do the same thing connecting to an external drive that is connected to a windows PC.

"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."

So then he asks Microsoft about all this.  The response could be featured in a future television program titled "Companies say the darndest things":

"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."

Yep, it's a good thing most people don't open and close their file folders on a computer as often as they play music on them, huh?  In the meantime, I look forward to opening my Word and Excel documents using a media player.