Another unintended Consequence of government regulation

If you happen to be buying a new windows machine these days and you get upset about how long it takes to start up, know that about a minute of that three minute start up time when you turn your machine on occurs because Microsoft can no longer control part of the user experience and that is true thanks to the Department of Justice.

Walt Mossberg says his Vista startup experience was pretty horrid because of the tons of ads and other things that OEMs load onto the OS. They do that to try to make a few extra bucks on each machine sold. Microsoft can’t stop them because the DOJ made it impossible to push around the OEMs and keep them from ruining the startup experience. . . .

It appears from Walt Mossberg that the start up time for Vista would still much slower than Macs even without this extra software, but an additional minute when you are having to already wait 2 minutes for your machine to start seems pretty long.

Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds. . . .