Dell Will Offer XP Past Cutoff Date

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, brings news that Dell will be offering Windows XP pre-installed on their computers past the June 30 cut-off date. Computers purchased with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate past June 30 will come with a copy of XP Pro. Dell plans to simply install that copy upon request to save users a step. Perhaps this will help Microsoft officials make up their minds about another extension.

Submitter diversity

[peipas]

I couldn't help but notice that the submitter, a commercial entity, currently has four articles on the front page.

Re:People still BUY Windows?

[yincrash]

Sorry, not everybody is a pirate.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[gx5000]

LOL, irresponsible ? support ? who still needs Xp support ?!
Here in the Gov 'o' Canada we are just starting to migrate to XP.
A lot of US Defense is just migrating to XP as well...
We have our own Support staff, and any user that chooses XP over
"supported" Vista obviously has a support route or has abandoned
the parachute knowingly. Remember that this is "By request".

PS: I'll have the porterhouse

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[electrosoccertux]

At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions?

?
XP has support into 2014. Wiki. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[andy9701]

Selling a computer with XP past the Microsoft cutoff date is pretty irresponsible. At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions?

It's my understanding that the only thing changing as of June 30 is that Microsoft is going to stop selling XP. XP will be supported until something like 2014, IIRC.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Even if they didn't have "support" from microsoft, Dell was already handling some of the support for their XP machines, so it's not fair to say it's unsupported, just "unsupported by vendor"

You ever actually tried to call Microsoft for Tech Support? The first words out of the Indian tech's mouth will be "Is this an OEM machine?" and then "Call Dell, we don't support you. *click*"

I work for Dell as a Prosupport Agent, and I get all kinds of software calls that we try our best to fix for people. 90% of the time they start out the call with "I called Microsoft and they said to call you..."

I don't mind those. I accept that Microsoft has gotten away with pushing support away from them to cut costs for so long that it's a given.

It's the "I called my ISP and they said that the DSL modem is connecting, and to call you to fix my Internet" calls that really grill my bacon. Seriously, your L1s can't even do netsh int ip reset log.txt or basic TCP/IP T/S? (Ping, check gateway, etc)? Seriously, what's the problem guys?

XP MCE Anyone

[Nom du Keyboard]

For the home user XP MCE is a far better deal cost-wise. It gives the most important feature of multi-processor support, while dropping the ability to join an Active Directory domain. A very fair trade-off for the home user.

So is Dell offering MCE as well still?

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Selling a computer with XP past the Microsoft cutoff date is pretty irresponsible. At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions?

Why, because that is what the customer wants? We have already moved our purchasing to used retailers in expectance of this day. We have no plans on installing Vista, and as much as I would love it, Linux is not a viable option at this time.

I applaude this decision and will do my best to support them if they continue selling XP.

Microsoft has stated XP will be technically supported until 2014.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[techno-vampire]

I spent 7.5 years doing support for an ISP, and I can tell you exactly what the problem is: most of the people doing L1 "support" for an ISP aren't techs, they're just every day, garden variety computer users with little, if any understanding of what's actually going on. All they can do is listen to the symptoms, guess which cheat-sheet for that particular set is appropriate and try it. If that doesn't work, they give up.

I remember, once, doing L2 support, where I got a caller who'd called in with the same difficulty four times and was finally escalated. The first tech had picked the wrong "resolution," and the next three had blindly followed the same wrong set of instructions without ever asking themselves why it would work this time. Clearly, they all suffered from the Bullwinkle syndrome. I, OTOH, looked at what had happened, realized that they'd gone off in the wrong direction and did something that not only was different, but was The Right Thing. In fact, what I did what what should always have been the L1 tech's first line of attack. (I went through the network settings and corrected them instead of removing and replacing Dial-Up Networking Yet Again.)

Re:Why do people still want this OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a photography lab. OSX and XP are the only supported operating systems for some Canon and Nikon cameras that are more than 2 years old. Given that Canon and Nikon are not writing vista drivers and/or supporting their older models on vista, those of us that use pro level cameras that are supposed to last 10 to 20 years are either stuck with XP or need to upgade to OSX.

Expressdigital Darkroom (used for tethering and for controlling a fuji frontier) only supports XP or OSX.

So, essentially, until the software and hardware that we use is supported by vista, we will use XP and OSX.

Re:Activation?

[lazy-ninja]

The cut off date is for OEM Sales ONLY. The OS is still live and active. Mainstream support through 2009 and extended/limited support through 2014.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[maotx]

Outlook uses RPC/MAPI to connect to Exchange while most opensource products rely on IMAP or POP. MAPI is the native API for Exchange interfacing and supports feature rich options that IMAP can not support (shared calendars, public folders, etc.) Additionally, Outlook has a wider base for third-party applications and a tight integration with Microsoft Office (duh) that provides options that are hard to resist. Replacing Exchange isn't that easy either as we have a mobile phone environment to support for syncing via "push" (windows mobile) and a PBX that utilizes Exchange's Unified Messaging. Believe me, I tried to find a comparable open source product as I do, and do mostly successfully, with most of our applications, but in most business environments there still is not an Outlook or Exchange killer.

Re:Outlook? You must be crazy.

[willyhill]

I guess I am. And taking my offtopic mods while I'm at it :)

Mactrope [slashdot.org] (clever play on Macthorpe [slashdot.org])
gnutoo [slashdot.org]
inTheLoo [slashdot.org]
Erris [slashdot.org] (oldest one)
willeyhill [slashdot.org] (the joke's on me)
westbake [slashdot.org] (clever play on westlake [slashdot.org]).

Hard to keep up.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[Kalriath]

No they can't. The license under which Windows source is provided to the mega-companies and governments that get it is for internal use only. If Dell were to actually distribute any source or object code from that to their customers, Microsoft would crush them like a bug.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[aix tom]

Amen on the "Retraining" part. So far it looks like Office 2007 might be finally a possibility to push OpenOffice in a few years in my workplace, when a switch to either will mean retraining anyway.

Re:If they won't sell it, we'll steal it.

[mr_matticus]

It seems that he is confusing Trademark law with Copyright law. It is my understanding that if a company does not use a trademark, they can lose the rights to it.

Abandonment of a copyright is not simply "not using it to sell copies" or "not making commercial use of their copyrighted work". Today, parties all but have to declare that they abandon their copyright in order for it to be so.

Trademarks are slightly different, but you have not framed the issue in the correct manner. It's not the non-use of a trademark that itself causes problems, but rather the failure to defend against others making use of it. You can sit on an unused trademark (say, the "Fairlane" name for Ford) if you might have use for it in the future or if it's a temporary gap in use (like when they retired the "Taurus" name for several years). As long as you prevent someone else from using it, it's not considered abandoned. Like copyright, abandonment is more than not using it. But abandonment and losing rights for failure to prosecute ("dilution") are distinct.

"Abandonware" still protected by copyright remains so. If you own a license already, the law allows you to take some otherwise unlawful means to continue using it once it has been abandoned by the manufacturer, but it does not allow you to sell or distribute it simply because the original company no longer chooses to.

The only place the law is really grey is if the company no longer exists AND no one purchased or was assigned the rights. There hasn't been an affirmative ruling on that to my knowledge, but there's a strong case that the copyright has lapsed if the holder and their estate/successor no longer exist.

Reading the Fine Print

[brainee28]

I read about this on Dell's website, and if you read the fine print, Dell will install the image for you, but if you need to reinstall from the XP disk they provide you, they won't support what you installed, only what they installed. Only the pre-installed image at the factory can be supported. However they will support Vista fully if you upgrade. This is a sneaky way of making XP fans happy, but giving them a time limit.

Re:Outlook? You must be crazy.

[cbart387]

You can't book a frigging meeting room in my company without inviting it to a meeting, and that's all Exchange/Outlook.

What do you need from the calendaring? Do you just need to receive/send invites? Or do you need to be able to look at people's calendar that they share through exchange? If you just need to send/receive invites... the lightning [mozilla.org] addon for thunderbird works well for that. At least it did when I used it last summer.

The way this works...

[Barny]

For those wondering :)

If you buy Vista Business or Ultimate, you have the option to upgrade to XP Pro or Windows 2000 instead, this only requires you to have a single license install media for the older OS but it doesn't have to be unique.

So dell simply brought a 1 user mass license for XP and give it out with that nifty "pre activated" thing, to everyone who gets vista business.

This process was explained to me by a MS OEM sales rep, sounds stupid imho, why not just keep selling XP?

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[tknd]

The grand parent wasn't saying that was how he decided, but rather that is how companies decide. I agree with what you're trying to say, it is stupid for a company to buy into a worthless support contract because legally the software vendor is not responsible for any problems that occur or are they even responsible for providing a solution. Support contracts are basically there so you have a number to call and whine to when shit hits the fan, and when your boss comes around and asks "why isn't it working," you can say, "well it's proprietary software vendor's X's fault." Which sounds a little better than "it broke."

I know how useless support contracts are because we just canceled one. We had an annual "support" contract with an old and dying vendor with some old and dying software. One day we decided to actually talk to them to see if they could fix our issue. And their answer was "pay us more money and we *might* fix it." We replied "nevermind." A month later I figured out what the issue was after dumping their junk software into a test environment and playing with the inputs we had access to. Eventually I found that it had a shitty algorithm for doing something stupid and we happen to have data that ran into the algorithm's worst case run-time. Altered how the data was being fed and the problem went away. I saved the company ten's of thousands of dollars that day.

Next when it came time to renew our annual support contract with this vendor, we decided to not renew it because not only did we know they were trying to leech huge amounts of money from us, but we also had plans to eventually retire the aging system. Bam, thousands of dollars saved for the company again.

Don't think that MS is the only "bad guy" when it comes to "support" contracts. Every big software vendor does it and everyone makes sure to cover their butts. If you honestly think you can save your company a lot of money just by terminating support contracts and ensuring that you can take the responsibility for supporting the software then by all means do it. But there are some support contracts that I think are stupid, but others that I think are essential. The easy way to figure that out is if the system fails, and you can't bring it back up in a reliable amount of time, then you probably shouldn't take that responsibility because you'll probably lose your job.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[drinkypoo]

Just keep in mind that the community has made service packs and shit for Windows 98 and it's all garbage, I tried both the usual sesp21 and the sesp30b and both made my system horribly unreliable.

If you have really reached the point where you are stuck with XP because Vista won't do the job, and you're not currently working on a project to switch your business from Windows to Linux or similar, then you are a sucker. Because Microsoft will just keep fucking you over.