Having a PC with XP pre-installed and a Vista capable sticker is one thing. At least the machine will work well unless you actually install Vista. The real problem is that the PC companies are selling PCs pre-installed with Vista that aren't capable of running it. I recently bought a Compaq PC with Vista Home Basic pre-installed. For a laugh I booted it up and gave it a whirl. Horrible horrible horrible. If I hadn't intended to wipe it and put CentOS Linux on it instead it would have gone back as unfit for purpose. After all the updates and so on the machine still took 10 mins from power on to useable desktop. Woe betide you actually want to open IE and Windows Explorer at once. Wait...... wait...... still waiting....... Why are companies even bothering to sell machines so under specified, 512MB is NOT ENOUGH! It comes down to being cheap. To me, a computer that cannot be used isn't cheap, it is a waste of money. MS and the computer manufacturers are all responsible for this mess and people need to stop rewarding this behaviour.

They do pay for it a little. I might overpay a little for the convenience of buying a complete machine if I could get it without an operating system. As it is the only easy way to do that seems to be to buy parts and assemble them myself - which is fine by me, saves me a little more money. There must be a fair chunk of the hardware market who are in the same boat, and until PC manufacturers will provide bare metal machines or machines with free operating systems preinstalled they won't be selling to us.

Software producers always give an optimistic minimum requirement. Users always have a few little utilities chugging away in the background.

But this seems to be a little bit more. When the advertising shows the resource-hog, and the minimum requirement is deliberately pared down to let older hardware be sold as compatible, we go from the optimism of advertisers into the borderlands of fraud.

... I was advised that Windows 3.0 would struggle with less than 4MB. I thought they were having a laugh considering that I had a massive 20MB hard drive. So I stumbled along with a Mac plus for a while more.. Until I had simply had enough of Sad Macs and Bombs. Finally I was cured of the GUI scourge. MSDos 3.3 is nirvana.

If Vista won't install on your machine, why exactly are you suing? I think the plaintiffs here were winners from the get go.

Windows Vista - from the people that brought you EDLIN.

Aaaaaaaaaaargh. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. I'm OK now.

i wish those vista capable moaners would get a life - i run vista business on an old p3 laptop and it works just fine - however i have a large number of games that claim to run on a p2 266 running a windows 98 and they have never been particularly playable on the same machine (under win98/2k and xp) yet we never see class action lawsuits aimed at the games industry for creative product specifications...

who wants to bet the vista moaners only want to use vista for a bit of web browsing and DTP which windows 2000 is more than capable of but want the full vista ultimate just to say they have it....

I hope microsoft get burned over this, not because I hate vista (I do by the way most bloated slow waste of time operating system I have ever used and that includes OS2/Warp), but because microsoft should not be "helping" their friends in the hardware trade by saying hardware is capable of something when its not just to boost up sales.

Hardware manufactures need to take responsibility for their kit. Make slow rubbish hardware then it doesnt sell and doesnt get described as capable of running something that its not. Make good hardware and it sells and gets described as capable. Intel graphics suck majorly, they need to really pull their thumb out if they want to compete with AMD/ATI and Nvidia and S3 in the integrated market.

although I don't use it much...

My old Dell Latitude laptop (512Mb, 1.1Mhz Pentium-M or something)

runs Vista at an acceptable speed - I only use it for an annoying Excel application which doesn't work in Wine but that's fine.

Only takes a minute or so to boot, about the same as the Suse Linux 10.3 on the other half of the hard drive.

Clearly some people have (inadvertently?) allowed too much crap to run on their Vista machines. Mine was an upgrade from a minimal XP install to Vista Business, which I did myself to make sure there was no other bloatware installed.

What is slightly annoying is that there is no Vista driver for the Radeon M6 card (so no Aero, but also no second monitor, which is a pain), or for the RT2400 Wifi PC-card I use in Linux - I had to find a USB adaptor and persuade Vista to use the WinXP driver for that (which *does* work)

The really annoying thing is that it is almost impossible to shut Vista down quickly - every time I try to switch off it wants to install another update. I tend to hibernate these days, but that's just putting off the inevitable...

Just how "compatible" does it have to be?

The PC IS capable of booting and "running" Vista. Nobody ever said it would be fast, they just said it would run. And it does. The argument that you cannot browse the internet whilst playing tunes on Itunes (or whatever) doesn't really hold water, because they said it was "Windows Vista Capable", not "Itunes & Internet Explorer" capable. Yes, it's crap. But it does do what they claimed it would. Whether it does what you assumed it would is irrelevant.

Just so long as it starts, it's "Capable".

The pre installing of Vista is no different to the pre installing of XP.

My mother brought a PC from PC World many moons ago with XP pre installed. The machine spec was a 1ghz intel celeron with 256MB of RAM and the performance was awful!

I doubt it very much so. M$ may have been trying to help themselves out. Vista was meant to be bloated even before its release.

But M$ wanted to phase out XP ... to do so they made "sure" that the low end PCs would be "Vista compatible", unfortunately it did not go that well, and now M$ is playing the blame card.

M$ we know you f-up. I've got an iBook G3@366 MHz that is running OS X 10.3 in a far more responsive way that a P4@1.8GHz is running 2000 that is better than the dualcore Pentium-D@2.6GHz running Vista Peasant Edition. It is not faster on bashing-CPU tasks but still responsive under heavy load.

Fix the bloody OS.

"i run vista business on an old p3 laptop and it works just fine"

That's nothing. I run it on a TRS-80 and it boots in 0.2 seconds!

As much as I'd like to join that lawsuit (any lawsuit - might as well get some extra cash for sitting on my ass... as much as I bitch about lawyers, they seem inevitable), I cannot.

Why? Simply because when I bought my last laptop in Nov 06 (with the coveted Vista Home Super Badazz upgrade promise lol), I got a Gateway with dual core AMD Turion yada yada, 160GB hd, 17" screen, and 2GB's of ram for $850. Upgraded to Vista Business once MS sent it out to folks in the Partner program and have been happy ever since.

I don't agree with that lawsuit anyway - why the hell would you buy some cheapass laptop with minimum specs and expect a new OS to run properly on it? A little bit of research would have shown anyone the light about Vista - XP Pro was a resource pig when it came out compared to Win2k, why would Vista be any different? Damn sheep and their ambulance-chasing lawyers...

As an aside, know how to test any given laptop with the proper specs for the job? The Twist Test. Grab any laptop and with the lid open, twist the front two corners. If it flexes, you have a broken/cracked motherboard in your future because the damn case is too flimsy (had some EMT/paramedics kill a bunch of Acers that way). Too many manufacturers go cheap and laptop designs change even from model to model from the same system builder.

And that's my rambling good deed for the day. Take it for what it's worth.

"we go from the optimism of advertisers into the borderlands of fraud."

All advertising is fraud.

They should be sued. There was no reason to create all that confusion with different versions except to deceive.

All the posts of "I run Vista on my 80386 yada yada" sort of beg the question - what exactly constitutes "Vista"? If my PC was labeled Vista-ready, am I allowed to expect that it run Aero and all the other bells and whistles?

I can't answer as I run linux/compiz and don't keep up with the Windows world much, but I think it's a valid question. It could be the money-grubbing lawyers have a point and there was some shady marketing going on...

take a look on the compaq website, for the evo n410c it also uses the radeon m6 gpu (if you can call a 1.0 score in vista a gpu), the windows xp drivers worked fine in vista for me

I use EDLIN all the time. Have done for years. It's perfectly capable (though I prefer T).

What's your childhood trauma?

6 versions is nothing. Try linux - there are hundereds of distros and multiple versions of many of the most common ones

Time to switch to Macs... at least give it or Linux a try... who knows, you might like it and wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

Phrases like, "wow... that was easy!" are common phrases with switchers.

That's nothing. I've got Vista Ultimate running on my 386 SX-33 and it's booted and ready before I even switch the computer on!

Vista + CGA screen FTW!

</Topper>

You What? Weak!

_I've_ got vista Ultimate installed and running in a virtual machine side by side with virtual servers which handle All of google's traffic, on my $4 rolex bought on the street in china, and the tiny watch battery powers it fine for 14 hours of Oblivion full graphics at WHUXGA 7680 × 4800 600fps. Uphill. Both ways.

</oldmanrant>