Couple sues Acer over sluggish Vista performance
An Ohio couple has sued Acer America Corp., accusing the computer maker of deceiving customers by claiming that laptops with just 1GB of memory can run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista, according to court documents.
They have asked the judge to grant the case class-action status.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco last Wednesday, Lora and Clay Wolph said that the Aspire notebook they bought in April 2008 "would not run properly" and would constantly freeze or crash when they tried to run Vista Home Premium.
The Aspire 4520-5458 notebook, which the Wolphs purchased for $586 from Wal-Mart, included 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 610M integrated graphics chipset, which grabs some of the system memory for its own use.
"Acer's Defective Notebooks are inherently defective in that they do not contain enough RAM to properly run Vista Premium despite being promoted and sold as a bundled product of both a notebook computer and a premium operating system," the Wolphs' lawsuit alleged. "As a result, the Defective Notebooks experience serious problems, including, but not limited to, freezing during use, crashing, requiring frequent restarts, and experiencing slow load times."
The Wolphs had to upgrade the Aspire to 2GB of RAM, at an out-of-pocket cost of $157, to make the notebook usable, they said.
Acer technical support dismissed their problems, according to the Wolphs' lawsuit. "Acer responded: 'If the system does not run properly, please not that Windows Vista recommended requirements for the memory is 1GB of system memory. However, the minimum requirements is [sic] 512MB of memory in which your system is pre-installed with. This means that the system is still able to run Windows Vista properly."
Some of the arguments made by the Wolphs have been voiced by plaintiffs' lawyers in the ongoing "Vista Capable" lawsuit, which has claimed that the entry-level Vista Home Basic is not the "real" Vista.
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