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 at 11:52 AM