Worse having Vista pre-installed
Having a PC with XP pre-installed and a Vista capable sticker is one thing. At least the machine will work well unless you actually install Vista. The real problem is that the PC companies are selling PCs pre-installed with Vista that aren't capable of running it. I recently bought a Compaq PC with Vista Home Basic pre-installed. For a laugh I booted it up and gave it a whirl. Horrible horrible horrible. If I hadn't intended to wipe it and put CentOS Linux on it instead it would have gone back as unfit for purpose. After all the updates and so on the machine still took 10 mins from power on to useable desktop. Woe betide you actually want to open IE and Windows Explorer at once. Wait...... wait...... still waiting....... Why are companies even bothering to sell machines so under specified, 512MB is NOT ENOUGH! It comes down to being cheap. To me, a computer that cannot be used isn't cheap, it is a waste of money. MS and the computer manufacturers are all responsible for this mess and people need to stop rewarding this behaviour.