Probably failed to run the Vista Update Tool before he installed the program. I fixed the problems it warned me about and have had few problems and no desire to go back to XP.
We at FR are very familiar with the incompetence of journalists, but I would hope that the editor-in-chief of PC magazine "spending hours tweaking and optimizing it" over the course of months would have thought to run such a tool.
“Probably failed to run the Vista Update Tool before he installed the program.”
Well, pray tell, how do you run an update to a program that has not yet been installed?
These don't sound like upgraded machines. These sound like new machines made to (allegedly) run Vista. In fact, they kinda sound like the one I'm using right now. It's a Dell C521 with an AMD 64-bit, dual-core processor and a gig of RAM. They probably even have the same Vista sticker on the front that this one does. On this one, however, I didn't let months of frustration go by.
I left Vista (Home edition) on it for a few hours and after my computer-teacher wife and I had a good laugh at its expense, I loaded Kubuntu onto it. With Vista, the box just crawled along. Simple tasks took as long or longer than they would have under WinXP. With Kubuntu (the AMD64 version) it flies. Anytime I tried to do something useful with it, the screen ominously faded to black and Vista warned that I was about to do something dangerous. With Linux, there's no dramatics. You simply get asked for the root password before you can do something "dangerous".
Now, this isn't the first Vista box we've played with. A few weeks earlier, we bought my father-in-law a new Dell. Like our new one, this one also came pre-loaded with Vista. (BTW: These are slightly older models bought "NIB" off eBay. Had we bought straight from Dell, we wouldn't have had them loaded with Vista.) Again, we laughed at it for a bit and then loaded WinXP. After playing with the newest one for a few hours, I realized that my FIL would have blown a gasket if we'd let him use that box with Vista. We'd have been getting calls every five minutes asking what to do about the latest sinister sounding pop-up warning.
My advise: If you simply must upgrade from Win9x or a perfectly good OS like WinXP, then either learn to use Linux or buy a Mac. With Linux, you may be able to get away with using your old hardware. The only thing you'll be investing is a bit of mental sweat equity. With a Mac, you'll be spending money on new hardware, but you'll have to do that with Vista anyway. You might as well pay a hardware bill that doesn't come with free frustration.