Did MS drop the ball with Vista?

[ShawnD1]

Vista is supposed to be a lot of things. It's beautiful, it's fast, it's media friendly, and it's secure. Right? Well, not really. If you look at websites for Dell, HP or any other prebuilt company (which easily account for 90+% of all PCs), you'll notice that the computers all come with the Home Basic version of Vista. Home Basic does not come with the Aero desktop, so it's not beautiful like it's supposed to be. Home Basic does not come with Windows Media Center, so it's not media friendly. Home Basic does not come with Scheduled Backup, Complete PC Backup, or BitLocker Drive Encryption, so it's not exactly secure.

What was the point of releasing a new operating system if 90% of the customers won't even notice the difference? If it doesn't have Aero, Remote Desktop, Windows Media Center, scheduled backups, or drive encryption, it's basically the same as Windows XP Home. They're not making extra money off this either since money goes to MS regardless of whether your new Dell computer comes with Windows XP or Windows Vista.

[GroundZero3]

Home is for really basic users. Those who get it aren't the ones who use RDP, encryption,media center, etc. Plus most basic dell machines and such aren't designed to run Areo and all the pretty eye candy.

If you look at XP, it had no media center either. You had to purchase that seperetly

However i think the 5 different version (aside from the 64 bit versions) was really stupid. Plus once they started removing stuff that was supposed to stand out, that is when it started to really go downhill

[Steve R Jones]

Home Basic is also the least expensive version to help keep the price of a store bought pc down...It can be upgraded when placing an order