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I’ve never been in love with Microsoft’s VISTA operative System, in any flavour. I am a happy XP user, and despite all the bugs and issues it has, it is still my OS of choice when it comes in building a PC. but as someone was singing, times are changing, so I must admit I’ve installed a couple of VISTA’s machines lately.

Said that, I ran through an interesting story lately, regarding the “VISTA Capable” inititive that Redmond based OS company has force PC manufacturing partners to adhere to, and the “special agreement” that Microsoft is accused of having made with chip manufacturer INTEL, so to make their old and uncapable 910 and 915 chipset versions still to enter the “VISTA Capable” program.

Of the many manufacturers that are partnering with Microsoft, HP (Hewlett Packard) is probably the one who has invested the most, both in time and money, to make its production line to stay inbetween the VISTA Capable HW indications, which due to the lack of sufficient power on both 910 and 915 chipsets to run the AERO interface of the new OS, meant to invest a lot of money to reorganize production line to use new and more uptodate motherboards in their PCs.

Considering that when we name HP we are not talking about a small PC vendor, but of one of the biggest PC and peripherals manufacturers in the world, we can easily understand why the decision of Microsoft to downgrade the limitations of the “VISTA Capable” program to accomodate INTEL’s requests is something that HP management didn’t like at all.

I’ll let you read the followups on The Inquirer, where I first read about this issue on the fine article written by Egan Orion, hoping he doesn’t mind that I name him in my un-professional blog.

Until there is not a final answer to the question as to why Microsoft did what they did, be assured I won’t be installing VISTA again on any PC, not to mention I won’t buy an HP either.