[plug] [OT] Vista is a serious mess?

[caston at arach.net.au]

I quoted a customer for a new system recently being careful to quote them for XP
instead of Vista yet on advice from their accountant they decided to flexi-rent
a HP Media centre PC from Harvey Normans running Vista retailed for more than
double my quote.  

The setup was terrible. IE kept failing to respond and had to be shutdown
sometimes taking nearly 5 minutes. The system was utterly sluggish. Took a lot
of tweaking to get it to play right with Telstra NextG USB wireless device. 
The system was behaving like most OS's behave when they have bad RAM but I ran
memtest86 over it and found no problems.

In the end I sold them a OEM copy of XP, nuked the Vista install and put XP on.
The XP installed worked fine.

SO to try and bring this ontopic I don't think Linux is going to have much
trouble competing with Vista. They have really laid a turd with this one.
However I admit I am yet to try Vista on a PC with more than 1gb of RAM. With
Vista 1gb RAM could be the new 256 or even 128mb.

I have yet to meet a customer that is happy with Vista even when it does seem to
run OK. As one customer said "it slows everything down".

best regards,

Chris