A Business Case for Linux? (Laptops Marketed and Sold as Microsoft Vista Ready)

I have had the dubious pleasure of helping more than one Microsoft Vista laptop user recover from “This thing is really slow” syndrome. So far the fix has been to take the pre-loaded Vista laptops that were sold with only 512MB of RAM installed, pull out the 512MB of RAM and install at least 2GB of RAM. Then to go into the Vista performance settings and choose speed over glitz. This makes Vista less slow for all the laptop users I have helped. It does not make Vista as fast as Microsoft’s Windows XP on the same hardware and definitely not as fast as Linux with X and a light window manager (I like fluxbox) on the same hardware, but it helps.

My question is why are these companies (like Acer, Dell and others) selling these memory anemic systems with Vista pre-loaded? It seems to me to be misleading to sell a laptop with Microsoft Vista and less than 2GB of RAM when everyone I know personally in the personal computing technical community seems to agree that 2GB is really the minimum RAM one needs to have a good experience with Microsoft’s Vista. The most recent laptop I fixed this way is an Acer Aspire 3690 series owned by a college student. When the young lady’s grandfather (a client of my company) contacted me about the problem I thought perhaps she had upgraded to Vista on a laptop with too little memory. However, when I got to the laptop I discovered it had the Microsoft Vista OEM stickers on it and that it had been sold to her with all the glitz “features” of Vista enabled but with only 512MB of RAM. Incredible as that may seem.

I think these companies should not be selling anything with Vista on it with less than 2GB of RAM, a minimum of 512MB of video memory and a top notch video processor. Anything less than that is misleading the customer. Further, the more I see of Vista on these “under powered” systems the more I think Linux can make inroads on the SOHO, home user and college user desktops, laptops and notebooks. Those of us that sell pre-loaded Linux systems just need to get the marketing ramped up and in the face of people looking for a new PC. We should also be willing to assist people as much as possible with a transition to Linux. It would be very exciting to me to see IBM/Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and other major personal computer vendors that are Linux friendly push Linux pre-loaded personal computers with some major advertising dollars. Will this happen? God alone knows for certain. I think it should, I think it will and I am waiting to see which company will be the first.

Edit: PC World has an article that agrees with me. ComputerWorld has the same article. This article says that 4GB is the “sweet spot”. Check out the Realistic Windows Ram Requirements at Pomona College.

Edit: add a clarification on these “under powered” systems. The phrase “under powered” is in quotes because these systems are not truly under powered, Vista is just over demanding of hardware. Changed the word “lot” to the phrase “minimum of 512MB”.