Windows Vista Home Basic has outlived its usefulness
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Microsoft has been hit with a class action lawsuit over the Vista Capable advertising campaign. While Vista Home Basic is not responsible for that, it may be the very reason it was created in the first place.
Vista Capable PCs sold back at the end of 2006, before Vista was released were incapable of running the advanced features; namely, the Aero Glass interface.
Intel did not yet have its graphics chips ready to support Aero Glass and it’s been argued that Intel pressured Microsoft to reduce the requirements for Vista so it could run on those chips. Microsoft did so and many owners wound up disappointed with their Vista experience.
It could be argued that Vista Home Basic was created for the soul purpose of being installed on computers that were incapable of supporting Aero Glass. Home Basic also lacked Windows DVD maker, Media Center and a couple other features.
According to ComputerWorld, internal Microsoft emails have some of its employees referring to Vista Home Basic as “Windows 2006,” indicating that some didn’t even consider it to be a true version of Vista.
Several retailers expressed extreme resistance to selling Vista Home Basic or computers equipped with that version of Vista. Others went so far as to say they wish it never existed but had to sell it because other retailers were selling it and its ill-conceived existence.
Now that almost every modern graphics chip/card in existence supports Aero Glass and the other advanced features of Vista Premium/Business/Ultimate, it’s time to take Vista Home Basic out back and shoot it; Old-Yeller style, only no one is going to be crying or upset about it.
Without Home Basic, there may be less confusion about the line-up. For whatever purpose it was created for, it is no longer needed. I’ll be happy to put Vista
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March 13th, 2008
As much as I am not a Vista fan, I will come to defense of this specific version. Micr0 Center was selling a closeout of a Acer laptop with Vista Home basic.
the laptop only has 512 RAM and 1.7 GHz speed. For a barebones computer with minimal specs. I was actually surprised to find this machine fairly quick for a Vista release.
If Microsoft left DRM out of this particular release and it would have been a good alternative to the other more bloated releases that just cannot run on other …even slightly older machines.
March 13th, 2008
I too will come to the defence of Vista Home Basic.
Two of my sisters have cheap Acer laptops that are less than a year old, and similar in spec to the one Ralph describes above. They have integrated on-board video, and no possibility to upgrade this. I recently installed an extra 1GB on them because they were running slowly (a combination of Acer Empowering Technology and Vista over utilising the pagefile), and now they run Vista quite well.
Apart from the fact they would not be able to use Aero they only have their laptops for basic web functions (chat, e-mail, ebay, facebook etc.), homework (word, excel, powerpoint) and managing their CD music collections for their MP3 players.