There's a series of M$ internal emails over on slashdot that clarifies some of this.
Apparently. M$ required vendors to use these stickers.
They allowed the vendors to use the stickers, after being assured that the vendor would put basic on the ones that were short of memory.
What happened is that some consumers never added memory and also upgraded to premium, or they simply trashed the OS in public and blamed MS for selling a bad product.
I upgraded my unit to 2G's of memory before I put it to work. I had some problems with third party apps at first, early in the release, but all those difficulties are fixed, and they were not the fault of the OS or MS. The last one to be fixed was Adobe (for example) They took their sweet time updating their program for Vista users and some of these laggards, caused some difficulties for Vista users. But all has been fixed, that I am aware of.
For me, Vista is now the best OS I have ever used and I feel the same way about it, that I felt about Win98, 2nd ed, when it came out.
I don't really understand the hatred being expressed here against MS, and can only trace it to Apple heads and people who despise Gates.
VISTA is a complicated, yet elegant OS that does everything I have asked it to do and then some. And I care not about the interface and the bells and whistles. It just runs very well at the core level, and it manages the systems resources like nothing I have ever seen before when you run multiple apps at the same time. It's flawless now.
If that's the case, then there does seem to be grounds to include Microsoft in a lawsuit, if there were were grounds for a lawsuit.
However, unless those computers aren't capable of running Vista Home Basic, then there isn't grounds for a lawsuit.
Low end systems usually run software more slowly than high end systems, and can't do everything that a high end system can.
Microsoft's advertising has said right from the beginning that not all systems would be able to run Aero.
Did Microsoft force vendors not to tell customers which systems might not provide good performance with some features of Vista? Did they tell vendors they had to sell customers low end systems on which they likely make less money instead of selling customers high end systems?
Or did the customers buy a low end system to save money, and then when it didn't perform to their expectations sue instead of returning it and buying a more expensive, faster system?