Last night I decided to take another look in the box that the U1010 came in, just to see if there were any goodies I was missing out on. Unlike the Shift the U1010 came with reinstall DVDs, as opposed to having a backup partition. I like the way the Shift can completely reload itself without any outside help, but having DVDs is a good idea too.

Anyway, in the box I found install DVDs for both Vista Business (which came preloaded) and Windows XP Tablet Edition. Now the performance on the U1010 has been fine on Vista, but I was curious to see just how much slower Vista was than XP on the relatively slow processor.


I expected the DVD to do a full restore on the machine, drivers and all, but not so. The DVD only restored Windows XP, the drivers were on a separate disc. On the first boot it asked for the disc, and the drivers began installing. I didn’t time it, but it took AGES. I would say over an hour, which is absurd!!

The worst thing was that they don’t seem to have install properly. Most of the drivers seem to have loaded, but the sound doesn’t work, nor does “tapping” on the mouse nipple to simulate a click. Not impressed.

Getting back to using XP on this machine, the difference in speed is astonishing. While the U1010 was “fine” before, it is now quick!! Programs open fast, Windows boots fast, and resuming from standby doesn’t feel like a cold boot!

The difference between the speed can partly be attributed to only having 2GB of RAM, I’m pretty sure of that. Vista just never seems to run as well on a 1GB machine as it does when you feed it 2GB.

Will I be keeping it on XP? Not for long. Funnily enough Kevin Toffel over at JKontheRun posted today about his experience with XP Tablet being somewhat unrewarding because of it’s comparitively poor inking capabilities, and he is spot on the money. Vista’s support for the touchscreen is just fabulous, and doesn’t feel like the afterthought that it does (and is) on XP Tablet Edition.

For months I have wondered where Vista truely excels over XP, and I have found the answer. For inking, Vista is top of the game.