Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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."
But all of those versions run like crap on a small machine.
Turning off Aero helps some, but the machine was underspeced for ANY version of Vista, and the manufacturer should have realized that.
By simply bundling in another 512meg of memory the manufacture could steal a march on their competition. Yet they chose to knuckle under to Microsoft and Intel.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
256 Mb is enough for a lightly used Gnome desktop. My mom has one, and it's working fine for her.
Your mom should try XFCE. It's much more lightweight, and for light usage it can be configured to look and act almost exactly like GNOME. I run XFCE on Xubuntu on my 512 MB Dell Latitude with its puny 1.5 Ghz Pentium M processor, and it flys!
My blog
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
At work, we have an old, repurposed desktop at our help desk for doing troubleshooting over the phone. It's either an old HP D310 or DC5000; I forget which. Has the worst kind of horrible, integrated Intel graphics and a gigabyte of RAM. 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor.
The Vista partition runs fine on it, and in fact runs faster than the XP partition. (Although that's due to all the garbage the other help desk workers have thrown on the machine; they stay away from the Vista partition because "Vista is slow.")
Mind you that we're not running Aero Glass or gaming on that machine - all we have to do is pull up a web browser to enter support tickets, we have to manage iPrint printeres and NetWare shares, and we boot up Office 2003 and 2007 to step people through the horribly complicated process of double-spacing their paper. But, it's pretty snappy for those kinds of tasks - and this desktop has got to be running on 5 years old.
Will Vista run on less than a gigabyte? Haven't tried it and wouldn't want to, but my friend got it running on the "Linux version" of the Acer AspireOne netbook - the one with 512 MB of RAM (he upgraded it to 1.5 GB), the Intel 945 GMA graphics, and the ridiculously slow 8 GB SSD drive. He vLited the crap out of an installer ISO and got Home Premium (minus Aero) running on there, and installed any programs he needed to a 16 GB SD card.
So, it is possible, and it will work, and it will do 99% of common word-processing-web-browsing tasks. His biggest complaint was that it wouldn't run Finale well, but Finale is about as memory-hungry as Photoshop.
Now, our 5-year-old work computer had no bloatware (we have VLK copies of Vista and XP, and the machine at one point had a fresh image.) The netbook also came without bloatware (it was the 8 GB Linux model after all; we did a fresh copy of Vista.)
Perhaps a more appropriate reason for a lawsuit (if any) would be for bundling bloatware, rather than selling an "underpowered" computer.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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)
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?