Alec Saunders, a former Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Canada, had a bone to pick with Windows Vista. After installing and using Microsoft's latest operating system, Saunders was on the brink of completely losing faith in Windows and the Redmond company. Windows Vista delivered a new low for quality and user experience, worse than Windows 98, and was nothing short of a rank disaster. Fed up with Vista, Sanders took action, and emailed Microsoft Chief Executive Office Steve Ballmer, Jeff Raikes, President, Microsoft Business Division and Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group. He almost immediately got answers from Sinofsky and Raikes.

However, later on, Saunders changed his tune by 180 degrees (thanks, dragun, for pointing this out). "I've got a bit of egg on my face," he stated, delivering an explanation of how it wasn't Vista at fault, but just system memory acting up. Saunders revealed that he had been wrong in delivering the statements related to poor Vista quality, because all the issues were generated by a malfunctioning 1 GB stick of RAM. After he replaced the faulty component with some 512 MB of system memory, Windows Vista stabilized. This perspective is very hard to believe. According to Saunders his copy of Windows Vista went from a rank disaster to stabilized and "very, very smooth" in the time of one month, and just by replacing a stick of RAM. Right...

While the underlying hardware architecture is of course directly responsible for the user experience you will get out of all your software, not just Windows Vista, Saunders' initial complaints were not restricted to just the quality of the operating system. He stated:

"1. Driver quality is low. The ATI graphics card I have installed in my PC regularly causes a spontaneous reboot. My HP scanner doesn't have a supported driver anymore.

2. Partner software quality is even worse. For example, over the weekend I installed Sony's software for the HDR-SR1 (their new high definition camcorder) and lived through a series of spontaneous reboots. On one PC I was able to do a system restore. On another, uninstall worked. However, at this point I am simply unable to retrieve or view video files from that Camera, as they are all recorded in the new AVCHD format.

3. The OS quality is also low. Subsystems sometimes stop working for no reason. The PC I have printers attached to simply decides not to print, periodically. Then the print spooler on all of the other Vista PC's attached to it simply stops and has to be manually restarted.

4. Microsoft software hasn't been fully tested on Vista either. I use Foldershare, quite a bit, which works intermittently. My Windows Live OneCare software sometimes works and sometimes not… on some PC's and not others."

So, to summarize, driver quality is low, third-party software is a mess, the actual quality of Windows Vista is poor, and Microsoft even failed to bother to test their own software products on the operating system. Of course, you can see how all these problems - and Saunders even commented that he could have gone on and on with what upset him about Vista - are caused by faulty RAM. It's not Windows Vista, no... Malfunctioning system memory is responsible for driver compatibility issues, application support problems and lousy performance in Vista compared to XP on the same system!

Sure... It's not Windows Vista... It's the RAM. Let me tell you about my own experience with Vista. I didn't see the need to by a new system when I upgraded from XP. I simply stuck in an additional 1 GB of RAM (good RAM, brand new and shiny, not the bad kind Saunders was using) on top of an existing 1 GB and was all ready to go. And yet I had to spend no less than six months looking at the "Calculating time remaining" message for far too much, almost a whole minute at times, when copying something like 50 KB worth of files. An operation that on XP was instantaneous, even when I was using Windows XP installed in a virtual machine on top of Vista as host operating system. Surprise, surprise, at the beginning of August, Microsoft released two update packs fixing performance, reliability and compatibility in - well, not in RAM - but in Windows Vista.

There are pieces of the puzzle that simply do not fall together for Saunders. First off, he states "the print spooler on all of the other Vista PC's attached to it simply stops and has to be manually restarted." Other Vista machine? Wait... So when he changed the misbehaving RAM on one Vista PC, it automatically fixed the issues on the second Vista PC as well? Where can I buy some of that magic system memory? Please tell me!

Additionally, Sanders did receive responses to his emails from Sinofsky and Raikes. "Within minutes of mailing this, I got a speedy reply from Jeff. Fabulous! Within 45 minutes I had mail back from Steven Sinofsky as well, explaining the steps they were taking to address these issues. Application compatibility and the video subsystem are two areas they're focused on at the moment, he told me," Saunders revealed. Hmm... what issues? How could Microsoft be working to correct RAM problems with Windows Vista?

The bottom line is that when Saunders went against Vista and Microsoft, the Redmond company made sure to remind him of his place, and he fell back in line. Now this is an explanation that I can buy. The RAM bit is the one that I'm having trouble swallowing.