Your Hardware Pwned by Vista

Like Windows XP and 2000, and the Windows versions of a decade ago, Windows Vista came on the market and seemed strangely beta-like, and keeping tradition, Vista has placed so tall demands on the computer's hardware that your computer would be slowed to a crawl unless it sported an unreasonable amount of RAM and graphics acceleration.

Many users have been either too annoyed by Vista's so-called user-friendliness or its poor hardware utilization that they have been tempted to downgrade to Windows XP, even if their newly purchased PC was still state of the art and well above the minimum requirements cited by Microsoft.

And were they in for a surprise, especially if they had bought a notebook computer. They would soon realize that no XP compatible drivers were available for the brand new network chip, graphics card, or sound chip. Some had luck finding back-ported drivers on the web, but many were forced to reinstall Vista on their computer.

The reason is obvious: notebook vendors have an incentive to use hardware that works only together with Windows Vista, because today it's hard to find a computer that doesn't include a pre-installed version of Vista. It would only imply increased costs if the hardware vendors had to develop drivers for XP as well.