PC Makers Offering a Bridge Back To XP 523
The Telegraph is reporting on efforts by PC manufacturers to give customers buying systems pre-installed with Windows Vista a much-sought way to downgrade to Windows XP. ( A few months back we discussed Microsoft's similar concession for corporate customers.) "It took took five years and $6 billion to develop, but Microsoft's Vista operating system, which was launched early this year, has been shunned by consumers — with computer manufacturers taking the bizarre step of offering downgrades to the old XP version of Windows."
Re:Bizzare? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shocker? (Score:5, Interesting)
XP is a good operating system. And after SP2 came out, it got even better. My place of employment plans to keep using Windows XP for the next few years. It's not that we don't want to upgrade to Vista. It's that we would have to change the whole computer system for each of our 200 seats in order to run it. If the transition was as painless as the jump from Windows 2000 to XP, I don't doubt that we would be in the middle of implementing it right now.
My one experience with Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
Said class is taught in the only lab in the building with Windows machines; everything else is Linux. The old Athlon XP boxes do just fine; I've got Monte Carlo running on some of them right now.
These computers are state-of-the-art: dual-core Pentiums, 2GB RAM, and
1. Half the time you can't log in because "An error occurred contacting the User Profile Service."
2. Sometimes you can't log in because of some other error I forget.
3. The things take forever to boot.
4. The first thing the students do when they get into Vista is
5. We use some shitty software called Excursion that lets you get X graphics back through a Windows ssh session. Trouble is, it sucks and crashes all the damn time.
So we're using ~$2k of Windows licenses and a bunch of spiffy hardware to
Non-MS Patches? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that it's a unacceptable solution for "enterprise" / "corporate" users to pick up random Windows patches from "non-trusted" sources, but I wonder if there would be a market for a "legitimate" company to start offering such support after Microsoft abandons XP users?
Re:I've been out of it but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How bad is Vista? (Score:2, Interesting)
What the hell is so wrong with it? I keep reading about how bad my performance should be and how nothing should work and it keeps all working. I guess I am magic. I like to think of it that way
On a side note, for speaking about Vista in a positive way I will report to the Slashdot gallows in the morning.
Vista on basic machines is unusable (Score:5, Interesting)
The long and the short of it is that if I bought this machine to run as a Windows PC it would have gone right back as unfit for purpose. Just getting the thing through its configuration took about 1 hour. Add a couple more hours for downloading and installing updates/patches. Then, restart and it takes 10 mins to get to a usable interface. Start more than one program at once and it slows to a crawl (eg explorer and IE7 at once) and the screen locks up. Simply awful. The shop told me that many people have complained that it was slow and their response was that it was a cheap machine. Well yes, but seriously, XP would function well enough on it. CentOS 5 spins along at a perfectly usable rate. Vista Basic. Nope.
MS has seriously lost the plot with this thing. Sure, stick a lot more RAM in and it will work OK but come on. Why is MS allowing companies to sell these woefully underspecified machines. It has a sticker on it saying it was designed for Vista but it really can't run it well enough for real world use. I know Compaq is to blame too, surely they could have tested these things. Even the lowest spec Mac will run Tiger nicely. Once you bump the RAM up on one of these Compaq things you could have bought a low end Mac mini which would still run better.
This machine should have come with XP. It is not Vista capable.
Re:The Time Has Come (Score:4, Interesting)
The only options: Maintenance, diversification, or decay. The American stockholder does not suffer maintenance, even if you've reached 100% market saturation, and diversification couldn't have been particularly interesting to a guy who fell in love with the personal computer. I doubt he gives a darn about the X-Box and the Zune beyond pride in his own company. The only thing that Microsoft is doing right now that seems to fit with his personal style is Silverlight.
So he packed it in and decided to do something useful with all that money. He is secure in the fact that he won. He pretty much achieved his stated goal of a world of personal computers, all running Microsoft software, and we all know that 100% is reserved for God. He won even to the point of getting a degree from Harvard, and that's all Bill really cares about as far as Microsoft is concerned.
He won, and he was too smart to hang around to wait until someone could make him lose. I don't think he was distancing himself from a bad company. He just quit when he had achieved what he wanted.
Smart guy.
--
Toro
(Wow. That came out a lot longer than I intended.)
Re:Windows ME again? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My one experience with Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of the box everything worked. Period. Wifi connected and downloaded my graphics drivers from Windows Update. After some reboots (admittedly more than I would like) everything went smoothly. I have only had a few freezes in my four months of use. The systems hibernates and restores without any trouble 100% of the time (more than I can say for ubuntu). The battery seems to last longer as well. Everything is snappy and I think the accelerated window manager is more subtle and tastefully done than compiz or beryl. Don't get me wrong, I love linux and use it whenever I don't need access to windows apps but there's no point in pretending like Vista is garbage. In my opinion it's a substancial upgrade over XP.
Can we name the OP's post? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the newest one I've seen bandied about lately. Kind of a post-slashdotism really. Quite clever to mock the very community you're MUCH to good to be a part of...or maybe it's just meant to be ironic. I mean, it is...but it would be enheartening if these posters see that it is (then I guess the jokes on me!).
Effectively you offer nothing (+5 Interesting!) but a rehash of another person's rehash of a set of observations about...observations condemning other posts for having...opinions, that might relay (God forbid it)...facts and stir conversion. Which I totally get. It's trite (??). All that talking and stuff can really bring a brother down. Sometimes I just hold my breath (*unless I read something somewhere really witty I can reiterate*).
Yet another downgrade ancedote... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
They have a laptop with Vista that I could use. Only problem is, I'm to be working on HD-DVD. Microsoft makes a free HD-DVD simulator for Windows, it even goes so far as to verify your WGA status before installing.
And the fuckers still haven't ported it to Vista.
Yes, even Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting their newest OS.
So, even though it's almost entirely an MS shop, I have to wait till Wednesday to get the XP downgrade for the thing. (My guess is, they're shipping a physical copy -- where's that "Windows Anytime Upgrade" now, huh?) And I can't do any work until then.
For anyone who actually follows my posts, yes, I'll be partitioning it with Ubuntu, and maybe the HD Sim will work under Wine. I will laugh my ass off if it does. If it doesn't, I'll dual boot, maybe try virtualizing, whatever works best -- of course, all of this on my own time.
Of course, I can't tell you if it's going to be like XP -- if by Service pack 2 (or 3, or 4), it'll be good enough that we'll all be telling everyone to upgrade. But I can't wait that long.
As far as I'm concerned, Vista is still Beta, and shame on Microsoft for making us pay for it before it's done.
Vista... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bizzare? (Score:3, Interesting)
The NS Optimum SPANKED the sony. Totally. Boot up times, launching programs, window refresh, just generally 'responsiveness' the sony was bloated, sluggish and slow. The Ns Optimum nippy, and crisp - almost as quick as XP, save network transfers of course! Even after cleaning off all the visible useless 'trial' apps on the sony, and updating every driver known to man, it still felt much more sluggish. It took a complete clean install from proper 'stock' media on the sony to get it to show it's hardware advantage.
OEM 'tweaked' builds with all their crapware and adware to increase their profit can absolutely cripple even a monster of a laptop on vista. There's plenty of reasons to avoid vista; dodgy drivers, especially if you're an x-fi user; the minimum spec; software incompatibility; DRM/activation ; bugs in general - but general speed on a machine with the grunt to run it shouldn't be it. Blame the OEM for that.
Re:They are lying. (Score:5, Interesting)
I work as a Tech for one of the big notebook companies in Australia.
When our first & second wave Vista machines came out. There were literally no drivers available for downgrading to XP, Even directly from the chipset manufacturers! The most competent people would manage to get XP running but the sound/modem/lan/wlan chipsets were changed so the machines would be largely unusable.
Many Techs would call up almost in tears as they'd just procured 500 of these units and needed to roll them back to XP. I still don't see any certification or claims made on our new machines that guarantee 100% XP compatibility yet they still bitch and moan despite their own ignorance.
Its funny, for the 1st half of the year, We would get daily complaints and death threats from the geeks/techs wanting Vista drivers for their XP machines. Now for 2nd half of the year its been daily complaints and death threats from geeks/techs wanting XP driver for their Vista machines!!
Re:About to "down grade" my laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
I did make a backup DVD since I sell my laptop again after 12 months and I will let the reader guess what the prospective buyer wants. After backup I fully installed Fedora 7 (no dual boot) and configured it (about 3 hours) and I have a fantastic platform. I have even installed Beryl/Compriz but I hardly use it since I prefer KDE, still it is useful to compare against Vista since Beryl does have a "wow!" interface, while Vista on the other hand has a "meh!' interface.
Before everyone tries to install Fedora a word of caution. You need to have good System Administration and fault-finding skills because every time I get a new kernel (approx every three weeks) I have to reinstall my Nvidia drivers which is an extra 5 minutes work for me and the same goes for my wireless card. There are more but not necessarily better user friendly Linux distros than Fedora 7 and I normally try to dissuade people from using Fedora 7 unless they are keen to really learn Linux.
To be fair Linux is not for everyone especially if you are dependent on Microsoft centric products and games (privately I am not). If you have a company laptop/PC chances are you have no choice but to use a Microsoft OS. The company I work for does allow us to choose what OS we use as long as we can do our work and like it or not I have to use Security software that is Microsoft Centric (XP to be precise) although I do have a dual boot to PCLinuxOS which works very well.
Re:Well, yes and no (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:how about a downgrade to ME (Score:2, Interesting)
I imagine it was all the crapware that sony installs (norton perhaps?) that was doing something awful. Laptop has been stable since.
Windows XP licences on eBay (Score:3, Interesting)
http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=windows+xp+licence [ebay.co.uk]
My Experience (Score:2, Interesting)
where risk of theft/damage is higher. Anyway I ended up with a $399 gateway with vista home basic,
1 GB Ram, celeron processor. Firstly, this is my first experience with Vista and well the first impression
is that it is dog slow. I first go to some web sites explaining how to turn off vista features to improve
performance - it helps a bit, but not enough. I should say my previous "beater" laptop was a toshiba 800ghz,
sattelite with win 2000 that gave up the ghost after 5 years - and despite the gateway having like 2x the cpu
and 3x the memory not to mention whatever you would expect moore's law to give you over 5 years this new
laptop was a real dog with Vista. So I finally bit the bullet and installed centos 5 (rhel 5) and I must say
that my little gateway was like a new machine - I was also pleasantly surprised that most of my hardware was
recognized - i did need to do some hacking to get the built in wireless to work - but man what a difference.
I think MS has really screwed up big time with Vista - forget linux vs MS - MS has to deliver on windows. period.
if they can't manage this after 6 Billion you have to wonder just wtf is going on in Redmond. I have to believe
if Bill G. was hands on with MS even he would have stopped the POS that Vista seems to be from leaving the station.