Vista Capable Lawsuit Loses Class-Action Status

nandemoari writes "The long-running 'Vista Capable' lawsuit challenging Microsoft's marketing of PCs capable of running only the most basic version of the Windows Vista operating system has reportedly lost its class-action status. Federal judge Marsha Pechman decertified the class-action lawsuit, saying that plaintiffs had failed to show that consumers paid more for PCs with the 'Vista Capable' label than they would have otherwise."

Comments

"Paid more"? What about "needed to replace?"

[zooblethorpe]

I'm confused by the judge's comment -- I thought the whole issue was *not* that users paid higher prices for "Vista Capable" machines, but rather that they bought such machines that were not actually capable of running Vista.

What gives?

Re:"Paid more"? What about "needed to replace?"

[andrewd18]

The fact that they had to pay more for a machine that was Vista capable, when the basic machines weren't Vista capable (yet labeled as such) is a big part of that argument.

Slightly Misleading

[pdabbadabba]

The summary (and, indeed, the article) is a little misleading. It is not that they didn't show that the plaintiffs didn't pay more (if the judge had found that, the case probably would have been dismissed). Rather, they lost their clase certification because they hadn't shown that all the plaintiffs in the class had uniformly overpaid.

To form a class, the plaintiffs' situations situations have to be relevantly similar. Her ruling was just that, in essence, the cases hadn't been shown to be similar enough to be litigated as a class.

Now the cases will proceed individually, with each plaintiff having to show individually that they overpaid.

Re:Monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/hardwareprogramme

Re:Not a Surprise

[Darth]

Face it, Vista got a bad name for three reasons:

1. The lowest-end computers certified to run it were not really capable (since fixed).

Microsoft ran the certification program that certified those low end computers as being capable of running vista. This was under Microsoft's control.

2. Nvidia's drivers sucked for the first 6 months.

While Nvidia's drivers sucking is not under Microsoft's direct control, the certification program that signs the drivers for use in Vista is. Were those drivers signed?
I will agree that the signing of the drivers doesn't necessarily mean that they don't suck, just that they wont harm your system; so in that way this one really shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility as long as the drivers weren't actually destructive.

3. The I/O subsystem was poorly designed (fixed in SP1), and the virtualization of video memory was a poor idea for Vista-32 that makes game memory usage balloon (hence the higher memory requirements for games under Vista, and problems running out of memory that players don't see on XP). REALITY: Vista should have pushed 64-bit as the primary OS.

clearly Microsoft's fault.

Only one of the above was really under Microsoft's control.

Two of them. Why do you think the first one is not Microsoft's fault?

I also don't agree that these are the only reasons Vista got a bad name, but I'm leaving that part alone.