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Vista To XP Upgrade Triples In Price, Now $150
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Dec 14, 2008 04:31 PM
from the don't-forget-special-reserve-windows-xp dept.
from the don't-forget-special-reserve-windows-xp dept.
ozmanjusri writes "Dell has tripled the charge to upgrade Vista PCs to XP. Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system. Rob Enderle says the downgrade fees could potentially be disastrous for Microsoft: 'The fix for this should be to focus like lasers on demand generation for Vista but instead Microsoft is focusing aggressively on financial penalties," says Enderle. 'Forcing customers to go someplace they don't want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.'"
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Bender sez... (Score:5, Funny)
Blackmail is such an ugly word...
I prefer "extortion." The "X" makes it sound cool
Re:Bender sez... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Bender sez... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am erotic. You are kinky. They are perverts.
We protect. Our allies enforce. Our enemies oppress.
Government appropriates. Telecoms lobby. WiFi users steal.
It all depends on your point of view.
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Re:Bender sez... (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing it would persuade me to do is pop over to The Pirate Bay.
If I've already paid Microsoft for an operating system then I'm not going to feel the tiniest twinge of guilt about downloading the one I really wanted.
Even if I haven't paid, stuff like this doesn't generate much sympathy. I'm more likely to think that a lot of people have paid twice so all I'm doing is "dumpster diving" for the unused copies.
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It will work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It will work... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It will work... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm tired of the "people are stupid" argument.
Become an educator.
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Re:It will work... (Score:5, Funny)
Smart people influence the stupid people, eh? Sorry, but explain eight years of Bush to me then.
You haven't been influenced yet? :P
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Re:It will work... (Score:5, Interesting)
The main thing is that Dell now sell most of their hardware at a spec that will run Vista acceptably, as long as you make sure you spec 1 or 2GB ram, and the memory upgrade is only slightly more than the XP cross-grade.
What I still want it to be able to spec a full Linux desktop with all the hardware supported fully. Why is this still so hard for them when the commmunity has 99% of all the issues sorted already?
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Re:It will work... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Being the consumer sheeple they are, they're going to go with what hits their wallet the least
The Pirate Bay
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Re:It will work... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope.
Actually the number of customers asking for Xp downgrades are going up. We sell them a low cost Windows XP Pro OEM license and a mouse. they add another sticker to their computer and for less than dell we have a local computer expert who downgrades their new HP,Sony,Dell to XP for very little AND gives them a real working antivirus (Avast) and no extra crud like Dell and the others like to force on you.
In fact friday I bought 20 more copes of XP OEM to make sure we have the stock.
the prices going up will make our sales go even faster.
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XP Pro is worth more (Score:5, Insightful)
They charge more for XP Pro, so it must be more valuable than Vista. I'll go with that instead.
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Re:XP Pro is worth more (Score:5, Funny)
*chuckle* That card already got played. I have a screenshot of the HP page for a laptop. It has a line that says:
"Upgrade to genuine Windows Vista Ultimate for $99 ($60 value)"
I know what they mean, but I couldn't stop myself from thinking "I can't wait to run out and spend $99 on something I value at $60!"
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Re:XP Pro is worth more (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:XP Pro is worth more (Score:5, Funny)
If you throw a wad of paper in there while holding the Shift key, does it disappear forever?
:D
Now *THAT* would be cool to see.
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Microsoft's is huge! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so huge and its hold is so strong that even the giants like Microsoft, trying their hardest to destroy it, can't succeed.
Re:Microsoft's Turd (Score:5, Interesting)
Anecdotal story: I helped my brother in-law install an XP partition on his laptop, since Vista was crashing (probably hardware/driver issues on a cheap HP laptop).
His comment: "Wow, it's faster and my old games work on it!"
I'd say that unless some magic new feature (which I've yet to see) balances out the slowness and incompatibility, Vista is arguably worse.
Can you name a feature that makes Vista better than XP in a way that can't be tweaked with a registry key or some free add-on? If you say aero then I won't argue, but most sane people use their OS to run other programs, not just a shiny UI...
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Re:Microsoft's Turd (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought my wife a computer for Christmas for around 300 - no monitor.
She asked that I install Linux on it for her.
She wasn't home when I set it up so I decided to give vista a whirl thinking that surely it isn't as resource intensive as everyone here makes it out to be.
This was not a high end system, but a definite upgrade from her old computer. It was a 2.1GHz 64 bit Dual Core Processor with 2 gig of ram.
It was worse than I could have imagined. The only thing that was fast was the boot time but afterward everything was almost non-responsive and did not get much better after all the drivers were installed.
I ended up installing 64 bit Debian Sid withe KDE 4 from experimental.
KDE 4 is blew Vista out of the water in terms of speed. I can't compare much of the features because Vista took so damn long to do anything I finally gave up.
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Part of an old culture, early PC performance curve (Score:5, Insightful)
I've personally never liked the idea of replacing a 7-year-old machine only to get the exact same (or worse) performance.
Amen. I believe this is a matter of cultural momentum. During the early days of PC adoption, you could easily forecast that hardware would become faster, memory would become plentiful, and (here's the important bit) that people would be hungry for improvement. This latter point was a crucial business driver, because there was so much unrealised potential in the PC during the early era. Can you actually write an entire book using a PC for example? You can now, but it wasn't so easy then.
When you look at today's performance and price curves, the forecasts have diverged a bit, and the business drivers will again be that strong. You can't keep adding multipliers to the resources an OS needs, because hardware capability isn't increasing logarithmically any more. And more to the point, the hunger isn't there any more. Superb capability has become a commodity, so there is little perceived need to fund improvements.
The issue with Microsoft is that -- largely due to their size -- they have been working on the assumption that people will always hunger for more, when in fact those needs have largely been met by now. If they really want to remain profitable, they should simply stop innovating, cut their team down to where their momentum is less than that of continental drift, and print copies of XP Pro to people who will still continue to insist on Windows for new computers. The rest of us would be grateful to them if they did.
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Economics (Score:5, Funny)
Well, since it's an upgrade, it's only fair that people should pay more, right?
Yohoho! (Score:5, Insightful)
Merry Christmas and a bottle of rum! But seriously, combined with economic downturn, more and more people will just pirate it.
How do they rationalize it to the consumer, I'm kind of curious, given that they phrase it as a "downgrade"
Hello... I'm a PC (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't wait for the Apple ads to make fun of this. People are willing to pay extra to avoid Windows Vista.
Re:Hello... I'm a PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Can people buy Macs with older versions of their OS?
Why would we? The issue here is that Microsoft's "progression" of operating systems is sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Apple seems to be consistently moving forward.
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Why so shocked (Score:5, Funny)
I believe I've seen this every year since 1994 (Score:5, Funny)
I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION [today.com] Milestone $MOCKUP.
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! - the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved $HATED user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint! It'll leave $LAST_VERSION utterly in the shade.
The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray(tm) of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.
A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day - the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets - in the shade.
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. We have to charge them more for $PREVIOUS_VERSION, to get them to understand just how cool $NEXT_VERSION will be.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
bigger inconvenience. (Score:5, Funny)
This could backfire by making XP look better (Score:5, Insightful)
That's partially true. People do believe the cost of something is related to it's value. Well now MS is implying that XP is better because it costs much more to have it. The sad thing is they're probably right in that it is better.
$150 is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
This won't really apply to home users but for corporate and office users they will not pay $150 to downgrade to XP when they can use the restore WinXP SP3 CD that came with the prior PCs. Long as the PCs have a license sticker on the machine such as Vista or higher they have the right to downgrade for free.
Dell is just milking everybody much as they can and it's wrong. Makes me wonder if this is even legal?
Vista is really not that bad... (Score:5, Informative)
... there, I said it!
I was forced to buy a new computer this summer in a hurry, and all I could get was Vista SP1. Maybe it's just that SP1 took care of the big issues that you hear about, I don't know. But it works just fine, quite responsive, stable as hell, and I haven't had a single problem with it. I turned off all the Aero crap because I just didn't care for it, not because it was a performance issue.
Mostly I'm in Ubuntu Intrepid anyway, but Vista is just the new Windows as far as I can tell - no worse than any of 'em. When I hear some of the stuff people say about Vista, I wonder what they're talking about, because it doesn't match my experience at all.
Re:Vista is really not that bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect at this point there are three problems with vista.
The first is word-of-mouth. Vista is bad because everyone says so. This started out as an informed opinion among IT people playing with Vista before SP1 and seeing that it was clearly slower then XP and with some sudden problems (like stalling of file copies and way too many UAC prompts and very few drivers). Many of those issues were fixed, but by then the informed opinion of people who know what they're talking about had been spread to people who like to think they're in the first group. These people eventually tried windows, probably poorly configured and certainly with cynical expectations, and naturally found instances of all the problems they were told about. Then, regardless of if these issues were reduced or even removed the opinion that vista was bad gets spread to the average user. They probably never try it at all, but just listen to the local guy who knows how to install things and open word without help. Basically... there were issues, and people told about these issues will continue to see them no matter how thoroughly they were fixed, because that's how expectations work.
The second issue is... the lack of obvious improvements. Ok, Vista's security model is better then XP's. It probably has some back-end improvements, and the move to 64-bit standard lays the groundwork for more theoretical improvement down the road. But does it run faster then XP? Is the user interface, to someone who's been using previous versions of windows all their life, easier to use then XP's? Is it easier to preform common tasks? No. Vista uses more resources then XP and on low-end PC's XP is way faster. Vista makes big changes to user interface, and while they're probably better for the long run, a long-time PC user will be lost when they first see Vista's UI... and may decide then and there that XP's was better. They'll try to open word, type something, and print it and find it takes twice as long on Vista. Maybe they'd eventually learn to do it faster in Vista then they did in XP, but by then they've already bought their downgrade rights and never looked back.
Finally, people are starting to get pissed off that they're being *forced* to an OS they don't want to use. Making DirectX 10 Vista only was a shitty thing to do to customers. All the talk about DRM and how they'll need all new everything from cables to televisions to watch "premium content" put people off, regardless of truth. And most of all, telling people that to use XP they'll have to buy Vista and then pay more isn't exactly endearing. People who want to use Linux have known for years how hard it is to get a standard, mass produced PC without paying for windows... and now for the first time people who want XP are finding that they can't just get an XP CD out of a bargin bin and get a computer without an OS. It's Vista or... Vista. Not even Vista or nothing.
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Re:Vista is really not that bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you do real work with it.
Vista Test by me.
Client DEMANDED Vista. we gave it to him.
Accounting software stopped working. Upgraded to a tune of $4500.00 to make it work.
Software for the CNC machines stopped working. (reporting and program generation) no solution. Must dual boot to XP or VMWARE to XP.
Software for CAD. Stopped working (Autocad Dongle Vista Issue.) Upgrade to fix the issue $8900.00
Vista COST that company well over $20,000.00 and give them a hit on productivity.
My Personal test... video editign station. New Vista system: Editing software fails or errors a LOT. under XP on the SAME HARDWARE it has no failures.
Vendor has no workable solution other than "we are working on that"
Vista take a working computer and makes it not work for it's job.
Now, I can switch from industry standard pro video editing software to one of the crappy toys that works under vista. but then the HDMI capture card and the other analog capture cards fail to operate as they DONT HAVE VISTA DRIVERS.
Vista is great for a home PC that is not used for anything. Vista sucks when you make money on the Computer and HAVE TO have the system work no matter what.
Hence almost EVERY corporation has no plants to upgrade to Vista. Even microsoft Puppets like Comcast are not doing it.
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I think it's just margin improvement for Dell (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Somebody had to post it
No.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get it either. Why anyone in the consumer space would want to use XP over Vista is beyond me at this point.
At this point I have been using Vista for over a year. Anytime I have to go back and use XP it feels like an out-dated system. For one, the lack of an integrated desktop search client is a huge productivity loss. It's like using a Mac without Spotlight, who really wants to do that anymore?
Secondly, desktop composition in Vista also vastly improves the windows switcher by providing live previews of the windows instead of undescriptive application icons.
Overall I find Vista to be a huge step forward in usability over XP.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
That's why Ubuntu is growing in popularity... it's about as efficient as XP while still including all of the useful features of Vista, like integrated search and composited desktop. Boots into about 200-300MB RAM used, which is 2-3x smaller than Vista, leaving room to virtualise Windows XP for your legacy applications.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year, I bought a medium level $800 Acer desktop for my aunt/uncle. I was tired of wrestling with their XP Home 500 mhz celeron. It wasn't just the slow speed, but the lack of UAC that made basic security with these two a nightmare. They wouldn't take Ubuntu because they absolutely had to have Quickbooks for the 3 invoices they wrote on it a year (I'm not joking, it's what they knew and didn't want alternatives to).
I will admit, with UAC, and putting them on non-administrative (just standard) accounts with Firefox on, Vista is much nicer than XP in this direction.
But when I got the computer, in addition to Acer's stupid and ultimately useless bloatware sucking up all the speed, Microsoft's Aero was set for maximum bling on integrated graphics. It took the computer minutes to start up. The entire time, out of the box, it sounded like it was grinding (and it was grinding to a halt with the hourglass every few minutes) as it was constantly swapping even with 2GB ram.
I stopped all that with over 15 tedious uninstalls of various components of Acer's pre-installed bloatware (why oh why can't MS have a synaptic type installer/uninstaller with multiple installs/uninstalls at once?) and stopping several services and setting all of the visual effects to minimize asides a few font/other smoothing settings. The machine felt several times faster.
But most of that is beyond the regular user. This computer, brand new, felt like a dog out of the box. Why Acer does this is beyond me, it can't look good for them. But more than that, why Microsoft lets them, will be the death of them one day. This is Apple's big win - their computers just work out of the box. And feel new and fast.
While the bloatware is not new, it's gets worse every reiteration. What is new is MS's own default settings are dragging the systems down. Not even uninstalls make it better. People have to muck with the systems.
I suppose that is part of the resistance to Vista. Security wise, and some other things (like icon/thumbnail browsing and editing - rotation) is much nicer. I like not seeing .db thumbnail files in every directory. Big win there. But the experience out of the box is abysmal.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
When Vista was first release, I had a client that used an industry specific billing/accounting/inventory management system for the health care industry. Granted I had been working with them for about 6 months and the software vendor warned them "WILL NOT WORK IN VISTA". I kept pressuring them to buy their workstations before the switch over. They wanted to go through Dell, that was the hardware vendor the software company recommended and why rock the boat, especially since they have to deal with said vendor long term.
At any rate, I warned them that on Jan 31st they wouldn't be able to buy PC's with XP loaded from Dell. Honestly, I think they thought I was lying or making it up. This was a small business less than 10 employees who were waiting for a big public aid check to come in. (80% of their business is public aid, and they get paid it's always a matter of when). I even told them in December to put the workstation purchases on the company credit card or go to the bank and get a 180 day short term note, but just buy the workstations before the switch over.
I finished up the disaster recovery plan and all the work I had been hired for about the middle of Jan. I told them again to buy the workstations then. But long story short, I got a phone call in March saying, "We can't buy XP from DELL, so we had to buy vista and the software won't work". I was working on another project 500 miles away and answered bluntly in six words: "Don't say I didn't warn you."
The software vendor flew down some engineers and the company got the luxury of spending $16k to be the beta testers for their Vista version of the software. Apparently it was July before they had all the kinks worked out.
I heard this story repeated several times with various in house or specialty applications in the early days. Especially in small businesses where suddenly, on of their cheap office PC's broke and they had to run out and buy a replacement, and all they could find was machines with Vista that couldn't run their software. It wasn't until the summer that MS allowed the option to pre-install XP again on machines.
Today, it's not that bad, but at launch, there were some problems.
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything that requires a control panel - they need a rewrite because of UAC (control panel applets can't elevate).
Anything that uses the system registry. Microsoft 'helpfully' redirect it. Ditto Program Files.
Several APIs no longer behave as they were documented in XP. This is a real git as it introduces hard to find bugs.
The one thing about porting projects is you quickly realize how buggy vista is.. You could't pay me to install it again (it's banned on the network anyway because it did something stupid to the routers).
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you quantify that? What tasks are quicker to perform? What functionality is easier to find?
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Funny it never worked for me. Probably because I have non-english Vista. It seems to me that Vista expects me to type the "friendly name" of the app. So typing "c" or "cm" does not offer "cmd". I always have to type in all of "eventvwr", "regedit", "notepad", "write", "explorer" - the programs I use most. Finding the program by typing the executable name never works. Annoying as hell.
Another pet peeve is that explorer is lying about file and directory names. Some clever brain in MS thinks that showing "user friendly" localized name of c:\users is a good idea. Removing hidden Desktop.ini helps. Try finding that in Help.
Another thing - copying from network to \program files is a no-no as long as UAC is enabled. I'm a developer so I want to copy my own executables on test system. Doesn't matter what are the permissions, whether I'm Administrator or not, whether I copy from network to Vista or to Vista from network ...
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
About 100-200ms depending on caffeine consumption minus typos. Another area where Vista is reinventing the wheel, badly. Can be made fun of like: "reinventing the wheel as a square", or "reinventing the 'wheel'" (root's group in Unix, UAC/security joke)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could use Launchy [launchy.net].
(1) alt/win+space
(2) n (selects notepad)
(3) enter
Bookmark the network share, then
(1) alt/win+space
(2) first letter or two of bookmark name
(3) enter
windows backup
(1) alt/win+space
(2) b, maybe a
(3) enter
And it works in windows XP, Vista, and Linux(!).
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
So when you want to run zapthealiens.exe, you hit windows+escape, type in "zap" and hit enter, and it auto-executes zapregistry.exe for you. Some progress, that.
Unix has had file completion for decades now, starting with csh and "set filec". But no-one has, to my knowledge, yet been stupid enough to make an autocomplete that makes a guess and presents or executes what's most likely. The user must make a choice, and the order choices are presented in are static and won't change depending on usage. To do otherwise is sheer stupidity. It defeats motoric learning.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The UI is a ton better than XP.
Yes, it does have problems, sometimes it even burps while copying files, which is bizarre to me, since it's such a basic function.
So you value the UI more highly than correct functionality during file copy? To me that says you don't do anything important with your computer. I have stuff I can't replace on my computers. My laptop dual boots with Vista and I find I fire up the Vista partition on average once every 6 months.
But XP is past its prime.
XP does everything I need and is more stable. If you call that "past its prime" give me "past its prime" every time please.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, it runs fine on my old machine to, the dual cpu quad core with 8gb ram... i don't see why everyone if complaining. Oh yeah, and I am a fucking moron.
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