It seems as if the Dutch are tired of Microsoft's finest breaking all the time, and they've set up a hotline for consumers complaining about Windows Vista.

A Microsoft product manager couldn't correctly explain the "Vista Capable" marketing slogan, according to recent filings in a lawsuit that claims the company misled consumers with a prerelease Vista campaign last year.

Your computer screen’s menus and icons disappear, slipping beneath a wall of funereal black. The computer still works, but it will not work for you.

A federal judge has said consumers may go ahead with a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over the way it advertised computers loaded with Windows XP as capable of running the Vista operating system.

The lawsuit said Microsoft's labeling of some PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" was misleading because many of those computers were not powerful enough to run all of Vista's features, including the much-touted "Aero" user interface.

The "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit took another step toward trial—or settlement—Tuesday when US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman denied Microsoft's request for dismissal. The suit was filed in March by a pair of miffed PC buyers.

"In contrast with Linux and even OS X, [Vista]’s expensive and bloated. Vista’s look may be shiny and attractive, but users aren’t being fooled by what their eyes are seeing. Everywhere you turn on the Internet, it’s easy to find another story of a loyal Windows user who after trying out Vista on their own machine has decided to downgrade to XP."

Around this time last year, computer manufactures were trying to convince people not to wait until Vista came out to buy a new computer. To that end Microsoft devised what was (and still is) considered to be one of the most confusing marketing campaigns ever.

I knew it. Vista simply wasn’t ready for prime time. Some internal documents that emerged from a class-action lawsuit over Vista Capable illustrated that hardware vendor, Dell, pushed back on Microsoft to fix issues with Vista before launching. Microsoft knew fully well of Dell’s feedback as early as Aug 2005.

There has been a meme going around in the Linux world that Vista is really a dog and that Microsoft is only managing to make its numbers by jamming the new OS down the throats of unwilling customers. Now I admit I don't use Vista and haven't spent a lot of time benchmarking it against Ubuntu or Mac OS X or any of the other non-Microsoft alternatives.