[henning]

Vista is problematic and I have suffered greatly, personally, because of its flaws, so I am certainly a vocal critic of it, but I don't understand the whining about systems requirements. Most machines you can buy these days are Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM or better, and in my obviously limited experience that's sufficient. A $600 laptop from Dell gets you that much.

Yes, you can't run Vista on a really old machine, which lots of people still have. It doesn't strike me as a valid criticism unless Microsoft fails to make clear that a given machine will not have an enjoyable experience due to performance problems.

I still choose to run XP, but then again I run Xubuntu on a quad-core machine just because it appeals to my neuroses.

[jksmith]

That's the increasingly fragile business model though. MSFT and generic PC makers are like siamese twins who can't be separated. The makers depend on MSFT to create new versions which require new hardware. In turn, MSFT gets exclusive distribution licenses from the makers.

If MSFT screws the product, as with Vista, the makers suffer the fallout because the market doesn't buy their latest generic plastic. Apple managed to identify this rotating gimmick early on, and went down the proprietary hardware path because it was their only choice. And look who has the market attention now.

So I'd say that the makers are a bit pissed right now that MSFT didn't hold up their end of the deal. They know that all the crap they sell is generally indistinguishable, but that didn't matter because MSFT would provide them with a mechanism for recurring income that was better than just waiting for the plastic to simply wear out.

And with MSFT depending on thousands of licenses just to keep the lights on, I'd say the next few years are going to be interesting for the siamese twins.

With my MacBook Pro, and my dual Dec Alpha box that I plan to put Genera on, I think I'll just sit back and watch.

[mechanical_fish]

I run Xubuntu on a quad-core machine just because it appeals to my neuroses.

You probably do a lot more with your machine than run Office, play Windows Solitaire, and read email. Three year old machines can do all of that perfectly well.

That $600 laptop is cheap, all right, but it's more expensive than "another few years for free". Especially when you multiply it by a headcount the size of GM's.

I do agree, though, that "systems requirements" is partly an excuse of convenience. It always looks better to complain about price-gouging vendors than to complain about the enormous amount of extra work, overtime, and personnel budget that a major OS upgrade might require of you. Plus, carping about Vista's systems requirements is easier than trying to use the phrase "sucks ass" in a corporate report without being fired.

[ardit33]

A little over a year ago, my sister bought a HP laptop (1.8gh, 512mb ram), with Windows XP, but with the option to upgrade to Vista for $15 when it came out.

Few months down the line, I bought a faster laptop for my parents, and realised how aweful Vista was. I still regret not having wiped it out, and just installed XP on it.

Then my sister asked me about upgrading ther laptop. That laptop was fast enough for XP, but not for Vista. Imagine, installing Vista limited to it. A laptop that was adeguately fast and decent for XP, it would have been dog slow for Vista, with very bad user interface and the awkwardnes of a really bad Operating system. My sister whould have been duped badly if I hadn't told her not to "updgrade" her computer.

Image all those people that bought Vista for $150+ as an upgrade from XP, maybe paid a $50 installation fee to the local BestBuy, and realise they just spent a lot of money in a very inferior product.

[anamax]

Vista isn't as usable on such a system as XP was on a system that was less than half as capable. (XP is faster with less than half the memory and one slower processor.) More to the point, Vista is annoyingly slow on such a system, and that's after I managed to turn off the indexer. (Said indexer made the system unusable.)

Until Vista, buying a new computer meant getting noticably something faster. It may not have been as much faster as the underlying hardware change, but it was faster. Vista broke that.