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."

Comments

512Meg?

[jawtheshark]

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.

Re:512Meg?

[the_humeister]

Linux runs fine tough on such "low-memory" (I had harddisks smaller than that, like 20Meg!) machines.

It's a little disingenuous to say that "Linux" (aside from the fact that Linux is just a kernel and that the term "Linux" is now being used in the mainstream for almost any Unix-like OS; but that's another argument altogether) will run in low memory. While this is true, most people wouldn't use it like that. My WRT54g with 16 MB of RAM is running OpenWRT. I had a 386 that only had 12 MB of RAM and I had X running with twm, and it ran only slightly faster than Windows 95, which had a much better looking UI.

So yes, you can run "Linux" on a low memory computer, but you're sure as hell not going to be running KDE or GNOME or some other good-looking interface with it.

Re:512Meg?

[jawtheshark]

Yes, indeed... You are of course right. However, I implied (that wasn't perhaps clear) that a 512Meg machine runs a Full Linux-Based Desktop like Gnome just fine. On my Asus EEE PC 701 4G, I rarely exceed 300Meg used.

But your points are well taken....

Re:512Meg?

[morgan_greywolf]

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!

Re:512Meg?

[icannotthinkofaname]

So the humankind hates computer geeks, scientists and any people that look smart. They just want to kill you on a very painful way and not have to call you to install another desktop manager.

Fine. Be that way. Just don't come cryin' to us when Brawndo doesn't actually have what plants crave.

Remember when a gigabyte of memory was a lot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks Vista for making that a thing of the past.

Re:Remember when a gigabyte of memory was a lot?

[Jurily]

How about when a 40MHz 386 with 4MB of RAM, 40MB Hard drive, a 128kb video card was a "killer" machine ;)

Ah yes. Back when they used CPU speed for timing purposes. You bought a new computer, suddenly your favorite game ran 8x as fast, and you died almost immediately. Killer machine indeed.

Vista's not too bad with 512Mb of RAM

[tjstork]

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.

Re:with certain OS features disabled

[Jurily]

More like "DOS".

Re:It's that damned theme engine

[hechacker1]

Aero offloads the GUI onto your graphics card if it is capable of DirectX 9. It provides a faster, tear free interface, and if you notice DWM.exe (Desktop Window Manager) uses only 0-1% of CPU during use.
If you disable Aero and fall back to GDI, DWM.exe will disappear, and explorer.exe instead takes the load, usually using 1-5% of my CPU (at least on this machine).
In general, you should get better performance if you have a decent video card. If you are using the desktop anyways, why not utilize the GPU?
A couple of considerations:
1. Vista uses more GPU ram with each window. If you have a shared memory GPU, it's conceivable that it would be too slow when you start opening many windows. Or if your GPU just doesn't have a lot of RAM.
2. Maybe your GPU isn't as power efficient as using the CPU for rendering the windows. Battery life could be affected.
3. Windows 7 with driver model 1.1 uses a constant amount of GPU ram for any amount of windows (steaming in textures instead of keeping them loaded). It also re-enables GDI 2D HW acceleration which was disabled in Vista, but available in XP. Windows 7 also accelerates Cleartype text.

Re:Strange story

[jawtheshark]

Why can't they reduce the memory allocation of the graphics to 256 or 128Mbyte?

Doesn't that depend on the laptop/BIOS/Chipset? I have Fujitsu-Siemens Pa1510 and it reserves 256Meg by default for the graphics card. Originally the machine had 1Gig, I upgraded it to 2Gig, which results in me having 1.8Gig available (still enough...) I only use it for 2D stuff, so I would be more than comfortable with 16Meg Framebuffer (1280x800x24bit=24576000bit=3072000Byte ~= 3MByte required) The BIOS has next to no options and under Linux I can't seem to adapt it (please, if you know how to, tell me!) I think I saw the option on Windows, but that's long ago and I might be mistaken. It's an ATI X1100 chipset.

Anyway, my point is that these cheapo machines (mine was an el-cheapo machine) usually don't give you such options.

Acer 5315 - Mandriva Linux, WinXP

[hduff]

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.