Price of PCs as Vista nears 475

The major problem with your hypothesis is that from what I can tell, virtually all PCs now being sold will run Vista.

In February, I bought a Toshiba A105-S2712 that only has chipset video Intel graphics accelerator 900 and 512 megabytes of shared memory. By simply adding another 512 megabyte module, the microsoft Vista advisor says it will run Vista WITH aero.

On Saturday, Dell had a one-day deal consisting of a B130 with a Pentium M, DVD burner and a gigabyte of memory for $499. I was looking at this for someone else and the Vista question came up. The Dell web site says it will run Vista if it has at least 768 megabytes of memory, but that it won't run Aero. However, I think that Dell is saying it won't run Aero when it really will: It has the same chipset and video (Intel graphics accelerator 900) as my Toshiba, so with 768 megabytes or more of memory, it would still have the required 512 megabytes of system memory after allowing 128 megabytes of shared memory for the video (and the Intel graphics accelerator 900 meets the other requirements, such as pixel shader 2, 128MB of video memory (which can be "shared" memory), etc.).

Now that's kind of baseline, remember this is low-end chipset video with shared memory. If that meets the Vista requirements (and that's Vista WITH Aero), and if those systems are available for as low as $499, I think your expectation of even lower prices may be disappointed.

Of course these systems are coming, right now, with XP installed. What you will probably see in the fall is PCs coming with XP installed and an offer of a "free upgrade to Vista" after Vista ships next year (e.g. they will send you a Vista upgrade CD). Actually, in my view, that's the best of both worlds because you will be getting BOTH XP and Vista. In fact, my plans are to put "dual installs" (XP and Vista) on most of my machines, since I know I have some older hardware and software that probably won't be Vista compatible.

However there are deals out there: with carefule shopping it's possible to get a laptop with an Intel Pentium M Core Solo CPU (e.g. not a Celeron) and a DVD burner for $500 to $600. And Vista or not, the period from Thanksgiving thru Christmas is always the best time of the year to buy a new laptop, and always offers some of the best deals available (the two other good times are memorial day weekend (graduation gifts for seniors going to college) and July and August (pre-school). And indeed there were some great deals memorial day weekend, and there are some good deals right now (check out the $68 plus 19 Toshiba A105 configuration offered on the back page of this weeks's Best Buy flyer, or the deals that Dell is offering this week with it's -different-deal-every-day "10 days of deals" special). The deals are out there if you look for them.

I'm really curious as to why the Dell web site would describa a system that seems Vista and Aero capable as not being so

- Bobb -