I have discovered one cause of "grumpy-old man" syndrome, typically known as a symptom of male meno-pause or "irritable male syndrome", (I think Germaine Greer give us some pointers on turning into one), [I know, I know that was a little low].
But it is infact caused by companies like Lenovo. Why ? Lemme explain.

I just got a new kick-a$$ laptop for my work. A Lenovo T61, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz, 3 GB of ram, 100GB HDD, and AN nVidia Quadro video card with 128MB of video ram. So, I think we can give those specs a polite "golf clap".

Now this is a Lenovo Think pad and it's running Vista Business with all the pre-packaged IBM stuff, ironically called "Thinkvantage". This is ironic because my boot time from typing in my password, (or using the finger-print scanner), is around 4-5 minutes depending on current phases of the moon. So, I spend alot of time thinking about, why does a top spec Laptop take around 5 minutes to load up before I can click "Start" ? Why would Lenovo/IBM sell me a business laptop that despite it's power is grossly inefficient. How come I only have 60GB of my 100GB available to use for my work/installations ?

So, we went to work and built a new image without the IBM "Bloatware". The problem is not so much Vista, although it's not completely innocent either. Once we removed the recovery partition (8-10GB) and just installed Vista Business with all the necessary drivers to run the video, hard drive, network and so forth, we clawed back a total of about 20 GB's. We also turned off Vista indexing which hammers away on startup which may handicap the start up by about an additional 30 seconds. The net result is that the start up time is reduced to about 1 minute and 20 seconds. Bearable, but much better than 5 minutes!

I wonder if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing in Lenovo ? I mean, it looks like each division within Lenovo operates as a silo, and just puts their junk on board the image without actually considering that in totality the combined result takes almost 5 minutes to boot. There doesn't seem to be a final performance test to confirm boot time, shut down time etc.

You would think part of a Business laptop is to actually be productive ASAP, right ?

I run vmWare 6.0 on the laptop, and have a "Windows XP Pro-SP2" VM. Now here's the clincher, this image starts in less time than my Vista Lappy can at about 1 minute 10 seconds! I was wondering if I am turning into a "grumpy-old man" about this, but I found that my experience is not unique.

He must have had to use a Lenovo T61 for too long !

So you have to ask if this is progress. All these h/w makers are doing their best to stick to Moore's Law and still, we have software that actually degrades performance...

I know, I know you are all probably thinking, "just go Linux dude"...