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Microsoft Laptop Recipient Auctioning Laptop
Salvance writes "While most bloggers who received the controversial Vista powered Acer from Microsoft are keeping them, Laughing Squid has decided to auction off his free laptop from Microsoft and donate all proceeds to the The Electronic Frontier Foundation. (EFF) He saw this as a great opportunity to support a worthy cause, and some other bloggers are following suit. What's funny is that Microsoft is now backpedaling and telling bloggers to send back the laptops. Do they even have a legal right to do so?"
Just a point of conjecture, I've been able to get Vista running without incident on two Acer laptops and and a ThinkPad that are one, two and three years old respectively. The newer two machines are both able to run Aero Glass as well. The requirements, bluntly put, aren't as steep as people make out.
They're asking for 512mb RAM, which has been standard, even on laptops for some years, and the rest is pretty much optional depending on the snazziness of the UI you wish to find. It's a lot compared to the vanishingly small footprint of some smaller Linux distributiosn, or perhaps a UI-less kernel with no drivers loaded. If you've ever used a Linux targetted at the desktop before though (Ubutnu, and some other larger distros) you'd know that while you could maybe drop the RAM as low as 256 or maybe even 128, you certainly wouldnt *want* to in terms of performance.
Regards
-Steve
The rules are simple.
1. Microsoft is always wrong
2. See rule 1
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.