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Vista Almost Ready

When Microsoft is wrong, I'm not shy about telling the world. When it's right, I'm the first to pat 'em on the back. In the case of the new class-action lawsuit over Vista Ready logos for PCs, I'm patting and complaining all at once.

Here's the rub. Dell, HP, IBM et al have been selling millions of PCs with Vista Ready logos. Consumers complain that many of these units can't handle higher-end revs of Vista, especially the Aero interface.

Here's where I defend Redmond. Vista comes in many forms and the lower-end versions do run on these machines. On the other hand, Aero is graphics-intensive, and requires the kind of GPU processing that used to be the domain of top engineers, scientists, videographers and pimply faced teenage gamers. And, to be legally precise, the logos don't say "Vista Aero Ready."

On the other hand, Vista does not play nearly as nice with hardware as I'd like. I've upgraded three or four older machines to XP, and in each case it was surprisingly flawless. Vista is a lot more demanding, making it tough to upgrade our current machines. And -- let's face it -- many of the units sold by Best Buy and Circuit City may run Vista, but they move slower than an Oscar acceptance speech.

Have you bought a Vista machine that wasn't up to snuff? Share your stories by writing me at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on February 25, 2008


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