The issues I have seen is when Best Buy, etc. were selling marginal laptops and their McDonald's Employees were stuffing Vista into them. Of course they all came back. I actually saw one that was sold to a neighbor that had 512 Meg of Ram installed; It was so slow it was not usable.
I noticed on my relative's new monster machine that 750 megs (3.25 Gigs free) of Ram were in use, with only a browser open...So no wonder my nieghbor's machine was paralyzed. Well, it DID have a Vista sticker on it.
As I upgrade my machines here, I put stickers on them, too. They have a Penguin on them.
I’ve bought a few PCs in the last year. Best Buy keeps losing my business as they only sell Vista loaded machines.
I got to Wal-mart and get an emachines with XP.