Vista" is gonna have many people following the upgrade train again... 9997

They've been doing it since Win2K (NT probably): C:-Documents and

How?

Since those are approx. 4x the XP requirements, and you usually exaggerate against MS by at least 100%, if we halve those requirements we're probably in the ballpark.

Where did you see this claim? I think you didn't see it. I think you made it up just now. You'll likely next claim you "might have been mistaken."

If the videocard vendors agree to such terms, it's their business.

You and Linux users and cola nuts have no absolute right to proprietary technologies invented by others. Build your own open source videocard manufacturer. Local cola nut 7 claims it can be done in as little as 9 months, and that open source video drivers will spell the end of nVidia and ATI.

Since you don't work at MS, you have no idea what they will be doing. All your lies and speculation and victimhood stances and ridiculous FUD is just pathetic.

Dell installs lots of non-MS software on XP machines. So does HP. And Sony. And every OEM I've ever seen.

But even if everything you say above is true (and it's definitely not), so what? If that's what the OEMs agree to, it's their business decision. It's not anti-compebreastive in any way for an OEM to agree to market only one vendor's products along with theirs. You're still free to buy or not buy the OEM's product.

The real question is: why doesn't Novell sign up some OEMs and create systems and aggressively marketing them. This Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttlesworth seems willing to devote a certain amount of money to Linux: he should be negotiating contracts to market Linux boxes.

For a year now I've heard endless whining about these OEM agreements and the pernicious terms. It's very suspicious that nobody on cola has ever actually seen one or copied one, and has any proof whatsoever that they exist.

Not that you or any cola nut needs any proof to make ridiculous claims in the first place.

Windows rules.