Adobe has spelled out their support policy for Creative Suite 3 running on Windows Vista Home Basic. So what is the policy? Don’t run Adobe Creative Suite 3 on Windows Vista Home Basic. Why not? They don’t come right out and say it, but all the information you need to figure it out is there.

Here’s the content of the knowledge base article they released:

Support Policy for Adobe Creative Suite 3 on Microsoft Vista Home Basic

Adobe Creative Suite 3 is not supported on Microsoft Vista Home Basic. The product was not tested on Vista Home Basic. If through the course of normal troubleshooting it is revealed that the problem is because of a limitation of the OS and not the application, then Adobe Technical Support may not be able to resolve the issue.

The wording on this is quite interesting. They say that troubleshooting may reveal the problem, yet no problem was described. The text before that statement was that the product wasn’t tested. Ahhh, there is the problem! So presumably the ‘resolution of the issue’ they describe would be to test the software on Vista Home Basic.

So let me get this straight, Adobe is saying that the problem is that they didn’t test CS3 on Vista Home Basic, but through troubleshooting, they may be able to reveal that a limitation of Vista Home Basic caused the lack of testing, and Adobe may therefore not be able to test it. It is because of this lack of testing, or the inability to test it if they wanted to, that prevents Adobe from supporting Creative Suite 3 on Windows Vista Home Basic. It’s all making sense now.

Adobe doesn’t consider Vista Home Basic to be a significant enough OS to test their product on. I would agree, Vista Home Basic shouldn’t have been released, and Microsoft is even being sued by others that feel the same way (Vista Home Basic capable does not equal Vista capable). Of course Microsoft isn’t going to mind this one bit. Now anyone that is running Vista Home Basic that wants to run CS3 on it will have to upgrade. That’s what Vista Home Basic is really about, getting their foot in the door so Microsoft can then force the rest through as well.