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The "Vista-Capable" Debacle Spreads To Acer
N!NJA writes in with a Register story on a lawsuit filed against Acer for selling Windows Vista on an underpowered notebook. Of course anybody can sue for anything; it will be interesting to see if this action goes forward in the courts. "With a lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco, California, two residents of Fostoria, Ohio seek damages and relief from the world's third-largest computer maker after purchasing a sub-$600 Aspire notebook that included Windows Vista Premium and a gigabyte of shared system and graphics memory. In its official "recommended system requirements," Microsoft recommends that an additional 128MB is required to run the Premium incarnation of its latest desktop operating system. ... Microsoft says that the Premium, Business, and Ultimate editions of Vista will run on 512MB systems — with certain OS features disabled. In the beginning, Redmond called these 'Vista Capable' machines, and it's facing a separate lawsuit over this potentially misleading moniker."
This post is capable of being a first post
Probably even with shared graphics memory, resulting in something like 448Meg usable? Windows XP SP0 and SP1 ran on 256Meg RAM, SP2 seems to need 512Meg RAM, SP3 seems to need a bit more (but I never tried taht one on low-memory machines). Vista on such a machine? Eeeuh.... I don't think so.
That said, they seem to have paid quite a lot of money to get a RAM upgrade.
Linux runs fine tough on such "low-memory" (I had harddisks smaller than that, like 20Meg!) machines.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Thanks Vista for making that a thing of the past.
Slashdot called this a 'Funny Capable' comment, and it will face a lawsuit if this turns out not to be true!
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
I've actually had Vista running in a 512mb virtual machine on my Linux box. My whole Linux box had but a gig at the time, and I had Ubuntu, KDevelop, the virtual box, Vista in it, running Visual Studio 2008 to develop an Excel application. I was rather impressed that it all worked.
This is my sig.
You mean "safe mode", right?
What?
Does the OS run on the notebook? Is it able to run the basic applications, even if the HD is swapping like crazy? If so, they're going to have trouble succeeding with the lawsuit.
You can't buy the cheapest thing available and expect it to run WELL. Only to run.
It works fine with 512... Its just incredibly slow!
Guys, I know Vista has way too many versions, but is it really that hard to remember that it's Windows Vista Home Premium (and for that matter, Vista Home Basic), not Vista Premium and Vista Basic?
--- Mr. DOS
If the machine kept freezing and crashing, why didn't they return it under warranty rather than go to law? If I buy a computer and it is obviously faulty, I should expect to exhaust the warranty process before starting a lawsuit, and I should not have to provide a technical explanation of what the supplier did wrong. It's broke, fix it.
Nowadays the concept that you get what you pay for seems obscure to some people. But then, looking at the number of rich and famous people who thought Bernie Madoff's "too good to be true" interest rates were somehow possible, it looks like stupidity is no respecter of class, celebrity or even IQ.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Companies like Dell have been selling "under-powered" computers for quite a while now.
I've had many calls in the past with people complaining of horribly slow performance, only to arrive and see that their Dell or HP machine is running Windows XP, with onboard graphics and only 128MB or RAM. Considering all of the exra "crap" these computers come bundled with... its not wonder it was painfully slow. Even disabling all of the unnecessary startup programs only slightly helped.
People are misled thinking they got a great deal on an XP compatible machine, and are not told its only really good enough to run XP only. anything above a base install of the OS starts severely degrading performance.
Turn off the Theme service and Vista Home Premium runs fine on a Netbook with 1GB of RAM, as my Fujitsu U810 proves. It's not terribly speedy, but quite usable unless you're in power-saver mode. All that UI gloss just makes things slow.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
You probably had to tweak it though? I bought a lower-midend Acer Desktop ($450-500, without monitor, with some dual core AMD chip) about a year ago and it was nasty even with 2GB ram. It was just meant for the wife to browse on, but out of the box, you would start it up and you could hear the harddrive, CPU, and fans working the entire time even though it was advertised as a quiet system.
They did absolutely no optimizations at all at the factory, and the problem corrected itself once I turned all the graphics bling off, which was cranked up to maximum to choke the integrated graphics, as well as tediously uninstalling Acer's recovery bloatware which was just obnoxious. It's not a particularly demanding skillset, but I'm not sure most computer illerate people could do it, and would otherwise be stuck with a computer that freezes every few minutes while it's cranking away and takes 5 minutes or more to boot up.
The only thing that stopped me from installing Ubuntu on the spot was that it came with no Windows Recovery disk and if murphy's law struck and she wanted some windows program, I didn't want to have to buy that at some outrageous price because the recovery partition got mucked somehow. Of course, in the meantime, out of the blue, Vista refused to boot up (and she was always on a normal, not administrator account) so Ubuntu went on it eventually anyway.
Its time wasting experiences like those that remind me why I prefer macs for the parents and linux for myself.
I purchased 4 of these at Wal-Mart. Mine got Mandriva Linux; I can run compiz with all the gee-whiz effects with no problems. The system is fast and reliable.
The other family members got WindowsXP "upgrades" using TinyXP after they complained about Vista slowness. Wow, what a difference! Fastest Windows machines I have seen since 98Lite.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
This shows just how evil capitalism is and you fucktarded USians are always willing to stick to the old ways of capitalism while the every other country is beginning to embrace or has embraced alternatives such as socialism and communism. M$ as well as any computer manufacturer is in it for money, the same reason other businesses are in it for. Money will destroy the world while communism and socialism will save it.
Signed,
The rest of the world.
Honestly, I don't understand what Vista can possibly be doing that it requires so much memory. What is it using it all for?
According to Acer this laptop ships with 1GB from the factory. And according to NewEgg upgrading to 2GB would be about $9.99 plus $2.99 shipping or going to 4GB would be just under $40.00. How the hell did she spend $157.40 on an upgrade that maxes out at $40 in parts and $30 in labor?
Vista does run reasonably with 872MB available to it as long as you stick to basic applications. OpenOffice, Firefox, Windows Media Player and etc. all run well enough. Crysis, Fallout 3, Photoshop CS4 and Visual Studio will run like dogs, if at all.
Vista capable is just like a DOT highway safety rating, just because your Kia is roadworthy doesn't mean that it will compete with a BMW for either performance or luxury.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
thing that pissed me off was the so called free upgrade to Vista that was advertised. When I went to get it I was asked for 80 euros. Dirty robbing thieving bastards. Service charge and postage - absolutely mad and a total con.
So I'm still happily using XP (and Centos)
Not sure, but you could say the same about other OSes and other environments. Mac OS X, if you don't load aqua, has a really small memory footprint but then balloons once aqua is loaded. Same with KDE and GNOME.
On my first laptop (Pentium based) I did a fair amount of web development work, so I often had a database (Postgres), web server, Netscape Communicator, and emacs all running at the same time, along with 6 xterms on an X desktop with FVWM2.
Total memory? 40 MB.
My current laptop has a spacious 1 GB and Linux, with Firefox and OpenOffice running doesn't even use half of it. Upgrading memory? Not worth the bother.
you buy one of the cheapest laptops you can find, Microsoft only supply XP to netbook makers, so it HAS to have Vista, then they complain its slow and unreliable, thats like buying an uber cheap Chinese moped and being surprised it spends every other week in the workshop.
what OS did Mr and Mrs Einstein think was going to be on it?, did Acer lie about the system specs?, why spend a hunk of money on something you obviously know nothing about?, didn`t they even wonder why it was cheap?, why are they paying so much for a couple of gig?, are they just really dumb and gullible?, should we care?
anyway, I have several Acers, including an newley bought Extensa 7620z, first thing I did when I got it home was to open it up and put 2gig in it, second thing I did was turn it on and install Ubuntu, never even saw the Vista startup, there`s no recovery disk so it`s not going to ever see it either
all my other machines run Linux too, the only issue I have is paying MS for something I have never used nor ever wanted too, if money was an issue for Mr and Mrs Einstein then maybe they should have just installed Ubuntu and saved themselves the cost of the ram, 8.10 runs fine on my Aspire one
There is one problem with vista though. On my brother's machine It only uses half the ram, but it has the swap file full and is swapping in and out like crazy. Any suggestions as to what the hell is wrong?
I run ion3, which is even more minimalist than XFCE most likely, but things can still get sluggish. In particular, Firefox is not so kind on older hardware.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Vista can run with 512MB RAM, yes... But running Vista and using one more program at the same time like Visual studio, Word, PSP7 is... Painfull... Vista as SO and Eclipse IDE for example? You 512MB PC will commit suicide before this
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
The longer I use Vista the more "Vista-Capable" seems like it's related to the term "Handi-capable".
Posting AC as I'm moderating.
There's "use" and there's "use", and I'm not sure which one you meant. If you're normally a Linux user and used to the way it uses swap, or if you're a tech that's just not familiar with the swap strategy Windows uses, it can get confusing, but see the next paragraph. However, if you mean the machine isn't seeing all the RAM and therefore not using it at all, that's different. One cause of that may be a 32-bit machine with more than 3 gigs RAM, due to the PCI device address space normally found at the top of the 4-gig 32-bit address space. Less RAM than that, perhaps it's as others have mentioned elsewhere, that it's a shared memory machine and the graphics are using part of it.
But as I mentioned, Windows has a much different swap strategy than Linux, but also one that confused me years ago before I ever switched to Linux, as it makes a sort of sense but isn't intuitive. On Windows, as long as swap is enabled, the OS will use it, preemptively preswapping, trying to keep a lot of stuff both in memory and in swap if it can, so if the memory taken by an app is needed by something else, the VMM can simply dump the physical memory copy since it's already in swap, instead of having to spend extra time swapping it out just when the user is waiting for whatever needs the memory to load. This means it's using swap long before it actually has to, to keep the extra copy there just in case. In fact, if swap is enabled, Windows at least /used/ (9x versions, whether it still does I haven't the foggiest) to break if it couldn't do this. I discovered this the hard way at one point when I installed a new CDROM that took the drive letter I /had/ been using for dedicated swap. Fortunately I knew enough about how the 9x versions worked that I was able to boot to DOS mode and mcedit the hidden msdos.sys or whatever file (it has been awhile, I'm no longer sure what file it was) and point the swap at a different device.
The effect of this is somewhat unintuitive. On Windows (again, 9x, but I believe it still applies today), if swap is enabled at all, it must effectively be the size of the physical memory at LEAST, before you get any "extra" virtual memory at all. If you have a swap LESS than the size of your physical memory, Windows may not be able to use the full physical memory at all. Either swap must be made bigger, preferrably double RAM or larger, or on big memory machines that don't really need swap anyway, it should be disabled entirely.
Linux (and presumably most OSs) work more intuitively and rather differently, but theoretically, maybe a bit slower when people are loading something new into physical meory. Swap is always additive. If you have a 2 gig physical memory and a half gig swap Linux machine, it'll let you use 2.5 gig, NOT the half-gig you might be stuck with on Windows. Also, it doesn't so aggressively pre-swap, tho adjusting the swappiness setting [1] can change that. Swappiness defaults to 60. Higher numbers cause it to favor swapping apps out to keep cache, lower numbers encourage it to favor keeping apps and flushing cache, once available memory is full of cache and apps.
I'm running kernel/md RAID, here, 4-spindle, RAID-6 for my main system so two-way striped (with two-way parity), with a swap partition set on each of the four spindles as well, with all four set to the same priority, so swap effectively runs RAID-0. Thus, the 4-way swap is actually faster than (re)loading stuff off the effectively 2-way striped RAID-6 (the other two being parity stripes), so I set swappiness high, 100, thus encouraging the kernel to swap out apps and keep cache data, because swapping in the apps out of the 4-way data striped swap will be faster than rereading the cached data off the two-way data striped RAID-6 main system. That of course is rather the opposite behavior most users, on a no-RAID single-spindle disk, will likely want. They may prefer to set swappiness much lower, say 20, or even 0.
---
[1] Swapp
AACCKKK, slashdot now kills moderation even if you check the post annon box! So much for modding THIS story!
I guess one has to post using another not-logged-in browser if one is moderating, now. I wish I had known that before I posted the above as AC, I'd have just posted regularly. Well, at least /. is giving more modpoints now. I got 15 this time instead of the usual 5, so the couple lost modpoints don't hurt quite so badly. But unnecessarily posting a comment as AC that's useful enough a lot of folks can probably use, does!
Oh, well...
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
Run W$ Vista having only 512 MBs of RAM??? The only possibility I see for that to be accomplished is to run it on a quadcore with 1 GB of cache. And I have serious doubts for it to work. I don't know a single vista user who runs it on a machine with less than 2 GB of RAM, because with 1 GB its performance is poor. In my opinion, Vista is like those very cheap clocks that you might use on your bedside table. The first time you buy one of those you feel it weighed, but when you open it's just a simple and light circuit with a piece of rock aside. Call me fan of free software, but to me Vista is an XP with a new icon set and many confirmation dialogs. And see no way to run Vista with less than 1 GB of RAM. I think there are many operating system options and each person picks the one more suitable for himself/herself. If you like Windows and/or Vista, then pay for it and buy a new machine each time a Windows version is released, or have patience. I prefer Debian GNU/Linux BY FAR. And for those who says I have be a geek to use a Debian or other open source OS, then ask yourself who repairs your Windows when its broken.
To give you an idea, my Windows 7 install is currently using about half of my RAM but the other half is being used as a cache. I have 20MB of unused RAM but another 500MB or so available for instant use. Vista does the same thing, it just doesn't explain it quite as well.
I *just* bought an HP HDX-18.
* Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1
* Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad Processor Q9100 (2.26 GHz)
* 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
* 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M
* 500GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
* 18.4" diagonal High Definition HP Ultra BrightView Infinity Display (1920x1080p)
* Blu-Ray +/-R/RW with SuperMulti
The Vista experience meter gives it a *THREE POINT EIGHT* on the usability scale.
If this less-than-a-year-old, Quad-core 2.26GHz, 4Gb System RAM, 1Gb VRAM, 5400RPM SATA HD system can't rate better than that, then why bother with Vista at all?
I sure as hell didn't.
I swapped the original drive for another 500Gb 5400 RPM SATA drive, installed Ubuntu, and haven't looked back.
YES I tweaked Vista to run better, I spent two days doing exactly that, and it really, honestly didn't make enough of a difference.
I shouldn't have to turn off half the OS in order to make a machine (especially one with specs like this) run like it's supposed to.
I'm from Findlay, OH, The county seat of Hancock County, and one of the very few places still GROWING in NW Ohio. (Findlay is 10 minutes from Fostoria.) Fostoria on the other hand....... The whole town is kept alive by one business, and there is nothing but railroad tracks in that small town. The town has a bad reputation too among all the other area towns... I am not surprised that some residents are looking for some cash.
Sounds like these two are just hoping to be rewarded millions from a Jury for their anguish. I hope the judge fines them for being greedy as he kicks them and the case out of the courtroom.
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
The Microsoft requirements page listed in the Register article says (at the bottom of the page):
Windows Vista minimum supported system requirements Home Basic / Home Premium / Business / Ultimate
The bottom-line is that if we take Microsoft's word as gospel, then the liability is on the Mfg. to have followed MS instructions and disabled certain OS functions by default, allowing the OS to function properly with less than 1 Gig of RAM.
Can they really sue (and win) the Mfg. for not setting the default OS options properly on a new system?
Ken