Employees Filing Suit Over Windows Vista Boot Times
According to a report this week in the National Law Journal, hourly employees of AT&T, UnitedHealth Group, and Cigna have sued their employers for not paying them for the 15 to 30 minutes it takes to start up and shut down their PCs.
The report doesn't mention Vista by name, but Las Vegas-based attorney Mark Thierman, the driving force behind the lawsuits, recently told The Registerthat Vista is believed to be the source of the issues.
Prior to Microsoft's release in February of Vista service pack 1, slow boot and shutdown times were one of the main sources of headaches for Vista users. Vista SP1 was intended to fix that, and by many VAR accounts, it has succeeded in this regard.
But it's really irrelevant whether the PCs involved in the lawsuits were running Vista, XP, OS X, or Linux; the bottom line is that any PC that takes 15 to 30 minutes to boot and shut down would probably have been thrown out the window long before creating a drain on productivity. And that's what makes this report slightly less than credible.
Nonetheless, Thierman's position is that the onus for sluggish PC boot and shutdown times should be on employers, and not their workers.
"These are hourly employees who are not making much more than minimum wage. There's a good half-hour a day that they're not being paid for. It adds up," Thierman told the National Law Journal.