There is good news and a bad news for everyone who is looking for better laptop options. The good news is that you can get a good, solid laptop for under $1,000 these days. The bad news for ‘Vista’ users is that majority of these cheap laptops coming with ‘Vista’ do not have sufficient resource base to run ‘Vista’ decently.
Merrill Lynch predicted that “2007 would be the year that notebooks overtook desktops”. For some companies, like ‘Hewlett-Packard’, laptops have become the single most important revenue source.
There are two reasons associated closely with each other. Firstly, a PC vendor can make more profit on an under-$1,000 laptop than it would on a PC at the same cost. Secondly, with the availability of Wi-Fi almost everywhere and laptop prices falling below the magic $1,000 mark, more and more customers and businesses are shifting to laptops.
But the problem starts with Microsoft. The under-$1,000 laptops can’t run ‘Vista’ efficiently. In addition, ‘Vista’ in fact constitutes a large portion of a laptop’s cost.
Upgrading the hardware again loads cost. ‘Vista Home Basic’ is actually no better than a trash.
Users at large do not upgrade their basic laptops. Computer cost margins are razor-thin. If people want top-of-the-line laptop, vendors are happy to provide them at an appropriate price. But companies like ‘Dell’, ‘HP’, and ‘Acer’ know it very well and now they sell more of their cheaper systems than premium ones.
A cheap laptop normally has a gigabyte or less RAM and some kind of embedded graphics chip like an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 8MB to 64MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory. ‘Vista’ on the other hand requires 2GB before it becomes usable, and there’s no point in even trying to run ‘Vista’s Aero interface’ with that low level of graphical horsepower.
Steven J. Vaughan says, “It doesn’t come to any surprise to me that Acer and Dell would both rather have you buy XP than Vista. Oh, I know, you’ll find those ‘Acer recommends Windows Vista Business for Business Computing’ labels and the like on their Web pages. But talk to the salespeople. You’ll find it fascinating how happy they are to direct you to XP”.
In reality, XP is more stable and works with more software and equipment than ‘Vista’ does. It costs the companies less in technical support.
Dell and few other small companies, like Asus with its tiny Eee PC 4G UMPC are also selling Linux-powered laptops. Vendors make even more upfront profit per unit for these sales.
Steven J. Vaughan makes further analysis and say,” that under-$500 Toshiba laptop with Home Basic? With 512MB of RAM and embedded Intel graphics, even the already mediocre Home Basic is still going to suck dead snakes through rusty tailpipes. Stick any Linux distribution on it; say ‘Fedora 8, gOS 1.02 or OpenSUSE 10.3’, and you’ve got a really useful laptop”.
Steven J.Vaughan says, “Do the math. Vista doesn’t work for today’s laptop market. XP and Linux do. It’s really that simple”.
Mechwarrior5
January 04th, 2008A thousand dollar laptop can handle vista just fine, or you could cut the price in half and build your own damn pc. Also I’m tired of all this whining on vista, get xp. Seriously quit complaining about it and get xp, the best desktop os currently out there. Also the biggest thing that’s pissing me off is all this talk about linux. Yes I freaking know it’s a desktop OS, yes I know it uses less resources than vista, we all know. Linux is not better than xp though cause the average user, and you’d be surprised by what the average user knows about computers, WOULD NOT be able to use linux.
jjMan
January 04th, 2008Hey, nice article. You are correct, Ubuntu and XP run SO much faster on my Dell laptop.
Quick question though. What app is running in your Vista screen shot?
I have never seen that one before.
- jj
Raymond
January 05th, 2008Mechwarrior, your comments are just so wrong…
A thousand dollar laptop cannot handle vista “just fine”, it barely meets minimum requirements. If even. Oh, some Linux distributions are very user-friendly, such as Ubuntu. I feel absolutely fine letting someone with little computer experience run Ubuntu, whereas I know that same person would ruin an XP computer (With viruses, spyware, etc.). Plus, you say that the average person would not be able to use linux (Which, as I said, is false), but you also say you could save money by building your own PC.
The average person cannot build their own PC.
Besides, almost no one can build their own laptop. Which is what the article is about. Oh, and to finish off all your points, this article isn’t whining about Vista, it’s stating that Linux or XP would work better on midrange laptops. Computer manufacturers have to sell Vista now, so the article is saying that cheap laptops could just be sold with Linux instead to lower costs and increase effectiveness.
Instead of making pointless comments, why don’t you just try Linux? It’s better than you think.
Natronix
January 06th, 2008I bought one of the Walmart special Acer Aspire 5315 laptops with Vista Basic on it. I switched it out with Vista Ultima x64. Yes, overkill but had to try this as an experiment. With 1G of RAM it is working just okay. I trimmed down as many of the “Services” I could to boost performance as much as possible and turned of all Vista features. Runs pretty well, but the real negative to the sub $1000 laptops, is their integrated video cards. I wanted to install Linux for this laptop, but was afraid I would be stuck without drivers for LAN, WPA2 WiFi, fax modem etc…
-NX1
Thales
January 07th, 2008Mechwarrior;
Do you think that everyone immediately knew how to run Windows when it came out? Nope, the learned. Same with Linux can be said. I recently migrated to CentOS, my 4 year old P4 desktop with CentOS 5.1 runs better than my $2,000 dual-core system with Vista Ultimate. I worked as a trainer for Dell during its’ Vista roll out, I was naive enough to believe it would be a decent OS. I learned my lesson the night I had to ghost machines with it… an extra three hours. Vista is trash. With the current trend of usability, aesthetics and multimedia emphasis that Ubuntu is brining to the table it won’t be long before it has begun to gobble up new users.
David
January 07th, 2008Linux is freat for a laptop. One small problem, though–getting WiFi to work easily. that was the dealbreaker for me, unfortunately. I guess I’m too dense for Linux.
Jeff
January 07th, 2008@Mechwarrior5: This article is about sub $1k laptops. And the article said get XP. And Linux has come a long way, perhaps you’ve heard of Ubuntu??
Nice Article.
Shane
January 07th, 2008Yup, I just installed Linux Mint on my wife’s laptop, she loves it and it runs 2wice as fast as XP even.
She can acually multitask. No offense to her, but she doesn’t know squat about computers and operates it fine Mechwarrior5.
N4TECguy
January 08th, 2008It’s amazing how lousy this article is. It makes a good point, I’m one of those using Vista Basic on a sub-1000 laptop. It’s not very fast but it’s usable and it’s EASY to use for my parents, who aren’t computer geeks. And herein lies the absolute fatal flaw of this article – it bashes on Vista but it does not provide a viable alternative. It talks about Linux like it’s the holy grail but doesn’t address the fact that many programs still either have no Linux version or don’t run as well. Don’t give me that OpenOffice crap either – I’ve used it and their spreadsheet is nowhere near as powerful as Excel. It doesn’t do what I need it to do.. Besides that, then you still have the trouble of finding a good Linux based OS, and making it work with your laptop, getting all the drivers and software in line, etc etc. Ok, Vista is slow, installing Linux takes a ton of time too.
ern
January 08th, 2008I’ve installed Vista on a number of sub-$1000 laptops, and they all run fine. Choose Linux if you like, but in all honesty, this carping about Vista is idiotic. It runs fine on any of these systems, including those with single core processors. Most of these complaints are just Microsoft bashing. Choose the OS you want: Vista, XP, Ubuntu. Whatever. They’ll all run fine on whatever system you choose.
leadsling
January 08th, 2008If Linux is preloaded the BELOW-AVERAGE user can use Linux. I was refurbishing some P3s I picked up at a school surplus sale to use in a computer lab we’re building for our church. I put gOS on them and then tested the install with first my wife, who BTW is almost computer illiterate. She was able to surf the net, check her email, type a note and print it, and play a CD without any instruction whatever. I then got 6 children, ages from 4-11 to try it out. None had any problems whatever. Quit trying to foist this idea that Linux is impossible for the average person to use. If it is installed for them, they can use it.
zer0-kill
January 09th, 2008You don’t even talk about the revelation of Linux>Vista until the end of the article, and even then you use XP to back up the claim. The title should be rewritten as Laptops Under $1,000 Perform Better With Linux & XP, Rather Than Vista. Small mistake no worries. Also you might want to cite your sources a little better than just saying that “Merrill Lynch says…” and you give no credibility to this Steven J.Vaughan guy.
Other than those faults good article, a bit condensed and rushed, but informative to most of the populace.
zer0-kill
January 09th, 2008@jjMan: That app is the console to change your sidebar widgets