This past Tuesday Michael Dell gave a talk about some of the products that Dell Inc. manufactures and his thoughts on Microsoft Vista. Mr. Dell said that many buyers are unhappy with netbooks because of slow performance and small screens.

“Take a user who’s used to a 15-inch notebook and then give him a 10-inch netbook,” stated Dell at the talk as pointed out by the Standard. “He’ll say ‘Oh, this is so cool, it’s so lightweight.’ Then 36 hours later he’ll say the screen’s not big enough, give me my 15-inch back.”

Dell Inc. sells several types of netbooks including the Dell Mini.

Michael Dell also took the time to point out Windows Vista flaws, but added the positive results of Windows 7. Mr. Dell blamed Microsoft for some of the PC manufacturing company’s problems with sales. He added that Windows Vista hurt the company’s image and caused a backlash. Dell restored XP as an option back in April and charges consumers $150 for operating system downgrades. But Windows 7 has been showing signs of promise. “If you get the latest processor technology and you get Windows 7 and Office 2010, you will love your PC again,” Dell added. “And we actually have not been able to say that for a long time.”

The state Senate of Texas yesterday gave approval to a state budget which includes excluding Windows Vista from being installed on the computers of government agencies without the consent of legislature.

Senator Juan Hinojosa proposed the exclusion because “of the many reports of problems with Vista.”

“We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide,” stated Hinojosa. Hinojosa is a Democrat from McAllen, Texas and he is the Vice Chairman of the Finance Committee. “And the XP operating system is working very well.”

[via ComputerWorld]

Lora and Clay Wolph of Ohio bought an Acer notebook from Wal-Mart in April 2008.  The notebook had 1GB of memory and claimed that this was enough memory to run Microsoft’s Windows Vista and still be fast enough to use.  The Wolphs filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco.

In the lawsuit, the couple claimed that the Aspire notebook “would not run properly” since they bought it.  It would constantly freeze or crash when they tried to run the Vista Home Premium operating system.  The Wolphs bought the Aspire 4520-5458 notebook for $586 and it included the 1GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce 610M graphics chip set.

To make the computer usable, the Wolphs had to spend another $157 to upgrade the RAM to 2GB.  Acer technical support dismissed their problems earlier.  Since the 1GB RAM was shared with the graphic chip set, that left less than 800MB of RAM to run Vista which is insufficient.

This was the first time I’ve heard of someone suing over slow Windows Vista performance.  Earlier this month I wrote about how Damone Dickerson was suing Microsoft competitor Apple Inc. for slow 3G speeds on the iPhone.

[via ComputerWeek]