James Governor cuts through the fog surrounding the "free evaluation laptop" issue, and gets at the real problem - which is something I really wish I had thought to notice:

Check out the specs… “an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4″ widescreen. It also has a 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera.”

That’s some pretty heavy specifications. The message I take away is not that Microsoft has an ethical problem but that the hardware upgrades required to run Vista smoothly are going to delight PC manufacturers most of all… If you need a Ferrari to have a decent road experience then Redmond, we may indeed have a problem. 2gig2gig…

Unless you're a serious gamer, you probably don't have a system anything like that, and it is telling that they sent out such high end systems as part of the evaluation. Sure, they didn't want the OS to crawl for the people getting them, but that's pretty far up the scale to go in order to ensure that. The Thinkpad I'm using right now has 768MB of RAM and the HD is small (just 35 GB). Yes, I always want more disk, and I could certainly use more memory - but XP typically runs fine on this hardware. I can only imagine how Vista would operate on this system...

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