Dell Brings Back XP to Home Systems Dell has realized that there are quite a few customers that don't want Vista. I can certainly understand this, as Vista thrives on new hardware and plenty of RAM. (NOTE: I also agree that there a number of legitimate reasons that one would want to stick with XP. Legacy hardware/peripherals and legacy applications with no free Vista upgrade path are great reasons to stay with XP, even on a brand new PC.)

Some of the Dell ads I've seen in Sunday newspaper flyers feature Vista machines with 512 MB of RAM. Pause. Think about that. 512 MB of RAM? Folks, the minimum amount of RAM for a Vista machine is 2 GBs. I don't care what the box says. Trust me on this one.

Shipping a new Vista PC with 512 MB of RAM is like shipping an XP system with 128 MB of RAM. It will boot - and that is about it. So, Dell is partly to blame for customers demanding XP, over Vista. Word of mouth can be a real bummer on emerging technology. If you hear enough people say 'Vista sucks', you'll be influenced to not even try it. I can assure you that anyone running Vista on a machine with 512 MB of RAM has every reason in the world to think that Vista sucks.

Shameless Vista Plug: Vista Media Center is awesome.