IMHO, it is a sad thing that so many OEM's are still selling Vista
preloaded on machines that shouldn't have it. If you want happy
customers, then make sure what you're selling will have enough power
to perform. OEM's should quit doing that.
I don't blame them at all. Most people don't buy Porsche, Farrari, or
Corvette because they don't need that kind of performance and/or they don't
wish to spend money on cars (regardless of they can afford or not), and it's
the same as they don't see the benefits of owning a powerful computer.
What system builders are doing is simply responding to the demand from their
customers based on the amount of money that they are willing to spend on the
item, just like you would for a car, dress, house, and so on. It's nothing
new and it has always been like this.
What will you do If a car dealer will sell you nothing but a Porsche or
Corvette? You would just buy it or turn to another dealer? What will
happen if the entire market has only those two or three cars?
You could try to "educate" customers for the "benefits", but still, it's up
to them to decide if those benefits are practical or relevant, and more
importantly, if they want to spend money on it.
The market is moving toward low-price and commodity-like systems, and that's
how the majority sees the value of computers.
Microsoft should increase
their minimum recommended configuration to a minimum standard of
performance, or an XP equivalency rating.
Agreed. My view is that they want to cope with the market trend for the
purchasing cost except the product doesn't meet that standard.
In addition to what Mark wrote about processor and hard drive speeds,
one should consider the amount of available memory. Your XP with 500MB
RAM may have more available memory than your Vista with 1GB RAM.
I would recommend a minimum of 2GB RAM and a 256MB video RAM for Vista
Ultimate, which are both substantially greater than what Microsoft
recommends as the minimums. The difference is between simply allowing
it to run and getting decent performance.
Many of the people that complain about system performance under Vista
are simply underpowered. Yes, it is a fact that Vista requires more
hardware. I say to them, get over it. XP required more than 2000,
which required more than NT, which required more than 98 and so on.
Your cell phone probably has more compute power than NASA used to put
a man on the moon, but you still wouldn't try to put a man on the moon
with your cell phone.
IMHO, it is a sad thing that so many OEM's are still selling Vista
preloaded on machines that shouldn't have it. If you want happy
customers, then make sure what you're selling will have enough power
to perform. OEM's should quit doing that. Microsoft should increase
their minimum recommended configuration to a minimum standard of
performance, or an XP equivalency rating.
-solon fox