I’ve been chipping away at this for a while now today, and I’ve learned a few things on the way:
- When Vista says it suggests installing the battery drivers for the system, don’t. The zip file it suggested I install broke power management.
- Patch the system fully as an admin user before logging in as a restricted user. It will save you hours of time.
- Sysinternals Diskmon doesn’t work with Vista - you need to run it as admin, and that certainly isn’t an option for my restricted users.
- Vista when hibernating just shows a black screen. That’s not very helpful the first time you try it, on a silent machine with no disk activity lights at all.
- think Vista takes longer to hibernate and come back from hibernation than XP, although coming back from sleep is much quicker than it’s older sibling.
Overall, I’m still happy. I have Vista, Office 2007 and Live Writer and 3.5Gb of disk space free. With no serious hacking the Dell runs at around 50% memory usage witrh a browser and live writer running. I can live with that. Battery life appears OK. It’s 10:30 and I’ve been using the Dell since 8pm, thrashing the disk (as much as there is one) and the wi-fi, and I’m at 38% battery. That puts me on track for about four hours or so and I can live with that.
