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

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: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:with certain OS features disabled

[Jurily]

More like "DOS".

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....