Survey Finds Few Intend to Upgrade to Vista

thefickler writes "A recent Harris Poll has found that while most online computers users are aware of Microsoft's Windows Vista, few are intending to switch over to the new operating system anytime soon. The Harris Poll of 2223 US online adults in early March found that 87% were aware of Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, only 12% of Vista-aware respondents were intending to upgrade to Vista in the next 12 months."

ORLY?

[kv9]

Unfortunately for Microsoft, only 12% of Vista-aware respondents were intending to upgrade to Vista in the next 12 months.

fortunately for Microsoft, the OEMs provide good business.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[Anonymous Coward]

"Downgrading" your license is possible, depending on the license [google.dk].

Upgrade is not MS game

[iamacat]

Most people buy a PC and run the same OS for its lifetime (which is around 5 years if you want current programs). "How many people are planning to buy a PC with Vista as opposed to any other computing device" survey would likely return 90%.

Re:I just switched... BACK

[geekoid]

You can't open a command window and type 'ipconfig' ?

Luckily I have a sane boss

[empaler]

At first, my boss was very excited about Vista (without having tried it on his own skin). I spoke to him about this and asked him to reconsider. Then he went online, googled for reviews and feature listings - and we are now no longer on the road to the DRM-upgrade.

In fact, given the chance, we'll probably start migrating to some form of Linux within 6-9 months. If only we had a well-functioning* alternative for Exchange/Outlook available...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:upgrade?

[GFree]

Vista - won't touch it with a 99 1/2 foot pole when the day comes that i have the money to upgrade

Screw that, spend the money instead to upgrade to the full 100 feet. 99.5 just ain't good enough!

Re:I just switched... BACK

[SEMW]

When using a laptop and traveling much, my ip-adress will often fluctuate. To show my IP-adress under XP, i doubleclick on the connection-icon in the systray and change to the second tab. Under Vista, i doubleclick the connection-icon and end up in the Connection-Center. From there, i have to choose the common Task to manage connections. There i have to rightclick on the connection and click on properties. THERE i have to click on the advanced-button.

IIRC, one of the resons behind the Vista Sidebar was to make oft-accessed information just like this very easily accessible. Sure enough, a quick Find More Gadgets search reveals:

My IP [live.com] -- "a compact gadget to display your current IP address"

Alternatively:

Wireless Network Controller [live.com] -- "a gadget to display your wireless network's current status and details. The gadget displays the SSID and Signal Strength; click on the SSID to open the Details flyout for all the network details such as Signal Quality, Security Status and IP Address."

Another alternative [live.com]; And another [live.com], etc. [codeproject.com].

Re:The "meh" starts now.

[SEMW]

but even the most recent ones (bought about a year ago) don't have the required hardware (TPM) to run it

FWIW, you don't need a TPM module to use the drive encryption; you can store the key on a USB flash drive (though you'd be well advised to make a backup flash drive and keep it in a safe in case the main one breaks).

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[Anonymous Coward]

on the dell website just go into the small business area and select xp as the operating system
why do people find this so difficult

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[clark0r]

according to an article not too long ago, you can get a full refund for your MS pre-installed OS within only 2 emails. I would think that they SHOULS fully support your decision to use an OS that doesn't require a 4GB of ram sweet-spot (XP is more like 2GB) and a 512mb graphics card to run at top video effects (XP is more like what, 32?) I don't see how you'd have to check the TOS before you could get a Vista refund. IMHO, you SHOULD be able to get a refund on ANY OS that costs you money without you wanting it.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[Grishnakh]

I don't understand: WGA is supposed to stop piracy, but it doesn't seem to have done much about the people on BitTorrent. So what is it for again? And why are you complaining about it? It seems like a non-issue to me.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[morcego]

Thankfully, around here we can still get Dell, HP and almost anything else with XP.
Which sucks, since I would love mine to come with FreeDOS (their version of No OS) but,
unfortunately, they (HP) only offer it on low end systems (Celeron/Sempron), and I'm getting a X2.

Actually....

[tacokill]

Actually - read your EULA.

A Vista license allows you to "downgrade".

No need to pirate

[novocastrian]

Most manufacturers offer their computers with Vista installed, but all it takes is a phone call or email to get them to put XP on it instead. I bought a Dell laptop a few weeks ago with XP & it was very easy to arrange.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[aaronl]

Actually, mechanical pencils kind of suck. You don't know how much graphite you have left, and the damn stuff breaks *way* too easily. With a wooden pencil, it's obvious how much you have left, and it's really hard to break the point.

Re:Returns

[x_MeRLiN_x]

Every PC I've ever bought was free of any OS.

Re:ORLY?

[ozmanjusri]

So what's the lack of average Joe interest in Linux reflect?.

Of the people I've talked computers with and who are aware of Linux, the common responses are:

1. Application lock in.
2. Format lock in.
3. FUD (many varieties of misinformation).
4. Unfamiliar UI.
5. Not sufficiently better/different (can't be bothered).
6. Lack of peer support (asking mates how to fix something).
7. Lack of hardware vendor support. (Sorry, I don't care if there's smoke coming from your peripheral. We won't help because you're using an unsupported OS).

My crowd's not particularly computer geeky (film/video and engineering, mostly), so it's not a huge sample size though.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[Charcharodon]

Dude, you shouldn't have bought a Dell.

Really come on getting upset with your Dell purchase is like getting upset for getting crapy food and service from a fast food joint.

Buying anything that is "XXX Capable" is just opening up yourself to disappointment. I learned that with my purchase of Dolby 5.1 "ready" surround sound powered speakers ten years ago that were anything but ready .

That is why I didn't by an "HD ready" TV or "802.11n compatable wireless router" and many other transitional technologies firms have dumped on us everytime something new comes out.

I feel your pain. It's a hard (expensive) lesson to learn, but unfortunately that's just the way things go with technology since everything changes so fast that consumer protection groups can't keep up.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[Anonymous Coward]

XP doesn't have WGA built in.

Try to pirate Vista, then talk.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[dryeo]

Blame Gates. For years he said that he'd rather you pirate windows then use the competition.
Imagine how well Windows would have succeeded if win3.x came with WGA.

Re:I just switched... BACK

[SEMW]

It's just in the way, even on a widescreen monitor - who would willingly sacrifice that much real estate?

It's not always on top, and doesn't take space away from applications -- by default, anyway, it just sits on the desktop, so the only thing it's nudging out of the way are desktop icons. Though there is an option to have it always on top, I can't see that many people would use it -- for exactly the reasons you say. So if you want to see your gadgets, you just winkey+M (minimize all) to see your desktop.

Alternatively, if you want it to work like Dashboard (i.e. gadgets appear temporarily over the top of your current applications), the shortcut is winkey+space, which brings the sidebar and any desktop gadgets to the front (and in focus), from where you can use winkey+g to cycle through them.

In fact, if you hide the sidebar altogether and just use desktop gadgets, and use winkey+space to bring them to the front when necessary, you can pretty much exactly emulate the functionality of Dashboard.

BTW, For what it's worth, the first version of MacOS to have gadgets was released in April 2005. The initial release of Konfabulator was in February 2003 (November 2004 for the Windows version). Windows Sidebar, meanwhile, was demonstrated as a Microsoft Research project called Sideshow in the summer of 2000 and first turned up in a public Longhorn build in September 2002, 5 months before Konfabulator and over 2 1/2 years before MacOS 10.4.

But then, BeOS had widgets way back in... er, whenever-it-was; certainly way before 2000.

Come to think of it, BeOS also apparently had Spotlight/Vista-style instant search [slashdot.org] a good 10 years before Spotlight and Vista.

So -- everything's ripping of BeOS?

Meh.

Open source crack? Interesting.

[Kadin2048]

Any chance you, or some Anonymous Coward, would like to provide a link or other information about that? I'm really curious since I've never heard of a crack being open-sourced before.

Cracking groups always seemed very -- at some points almost comically -- secretive about their source code and method of exploits; I'd sooner expect a crack dealer to give you the name of his wholesaler than for a cracker to distribute source.

Kinda makes me wonder if perhaps the number of trojans disguised as cracks [apcmag.com] have been the push necessary even to push the 'black' areas of coding into open source.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[ddoctor]

Um... hello?

You can buy new computers without an operating system. I did it last week.

If you don't want to buy a new computer with vista, don't buy a new computer with vista! Get one without vista! They exist!

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[Opportunist]

Welcome to consumerland, stranger...

Go into one of the consumer markets (you know, the ones where the average sales person doesn't know a laptop from a programmable refrigerator) and try, just try, to get a computer without an OS.

That's unfortunately the place most consumers (the people who'd be qualified to work there 'caus they can't tell the difference either) go. They don't go to computer vendors, they often don't even know they exist.

And that's how Vista is being sold.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[boteeka]

WGA is supposed to stop piracy

WGA is supposed to look like it's trying to stop piracy, but instead it just spies upon you. That's why people complain about it.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned (now living in Ubuntu)

[DrSomebody]

I am interested in Linux and want to give it a fair shake, but after I spend three hours tinkering with it to get it to perform some minor task, I need to get some real work done so I switch back over to XP.

There is a quicker way to solve installation problems. The excellent forum at http://ubuntuforums.org/ [ubuntuforums.org] is the easy way to solve issues. I had six issues . . . displaying across two flat-screen monitors, wireless connection, an NTFS USB drive, synchronisation of my Motorola phone, and connection to a windows network at MSHOME. I wrote up my issues on this excellent forum and the first issue was solved in about 6 minutes, the second in about 8 minutes, and all my issues were solved within 35 minutes. Boy are they fast in the Ubuntu forums.

In comparison, when I was installing Windows Vista, I could not find a forum to address and when I did, I am still waiting for any of my Vista issues to be discussed by anyone but me.

Installation of ubuntu including settling issues 75 minutes. Installation of Vista . . . 4 hours and still some issues were outstanding when I decided to "can" Vista and install Ubuntu.

AND by the way, all my clients run Windows of some flavor. I create and share documents with them with the greatest of ease . . . it is called Google Documents. My clients can copy Google Documents into Windows Office and vice versa. Most of my clients have stopped copying the documents into Windows. They are happy to work with documents in Google Documents itself. Great collaboration tool.

There are serious alternatives to Windows.

Re:Early Adoptor == Burned

[whitmer]

Microsoft depends on piracy to increase the number of computers their products are on. People using torrents are just helping them out.

Parent post is not funny, it's insightful. Few weeks ago Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes was quoted "If they're going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else". Information Week covered this. http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=198000211 [informationweek.com]

Dell Vista CANT be downgraded to XP

[Anonymous Coward]

My gov't agency won't be using Vista anytime soon, but we have a contract to buy Dells very cheap. Dells now only come with Vista. We bought one with Vista Basic (cheapest MS tax) and tried to toast the HD and install XP. Can't be done easily - there are two issues. One is, it's like the EFI is on the hard disk - a new Dell box won't boot at all if you wipe it's original disk or put in another disk. Second is, even with this single-HD box, Dell has enabled RAIDing - you have to change the setting from "RAID ON" to "RAID autosense" (there is no "RAID off"!) becuase XP can't deal with Dells RAIDing.

Get used to it - PCs are now like Cadillacs - buy the one you want for now, weld the hood shut, drive it for 100K and trade it in when you want another function. Don't even think about modding it to meet your needs.