A lawsuit has been filed against Microsoft for allegedly misleading customers by allowing “Windows Vista Capable” stickers to be put on machines that can only run the most basic, stripped down version of Vista.
Microsoft Vista buyer Dianne Kelley has filed a US lawsuit against the corporation claiming that the “Windows Vista Capable” guarantee was deceptive and unfair.
Microsoft officially defines a “Windows Vista Capable” PC as one that has minimum 800MHz processor, 512MB of memory and a DirectX graphics card, although this specification of computer will not run Vista Premium or Standard but only Basic.
Kelley’s lawyer, Michael Rosenberger, claims that Microsoft is selling all versions of Vista on the back of the marketing campaign for Vista Premium, even though the basic version of Vista does not include any of the “wow” features like Media Centre and the 3D Aero interface.
A recent analysis by Everdream, an American desktop management service provider, found that 79pc of desktops “are not fully compatible with Microsoft’s requirements”.
This analysis of nearly 145,000 desktops found that, based on Microsoft’s definition of minimum requirements, 24.9pc of machines do not have the required RAM and 15pc of machines do not have the required hard drive to run Vista Basic.
For Vista Premium to run within recommended requirements 69.5pc of machines do not have the necessary RAM and 62.4pc do not have the required hard drive.
Ed Mueller, chief marketing officer for Everdream, said: “Clearly many companies face stark realities as they consider upgrading their IT assets to Windows Vista in the coming months.”
Strangely, in a Dell guide designed to “help make sure your system is equipped to support the Vista experience you want” Vista Basic is described as “great for: booting the operating system, without running applications or games”.
By Marie Boran
