Vista To XP Upgrade Triples In Price, Now $150 907
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.'"
$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?
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does Microsoft charge them more for XP? (Which would be illogical for older software).
Surely they don't prtend that it costs more to dump one image to a drive rather than another?
Costs more because of diver support? Nope, Dell don't write the drivers...
So, I'm confused as to how they can justify this.
Mind you, not surprising from a company that charges the same for a PC with Linux as it does for Vista....
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bender sez... (Score:5, Interesting)
Buy an acer instead (Score:2, Interesting)
The aspire one with 1G ram and 160G hard-drive (same hardware), is available both with windows xp and linux, the linux one costs 50EURless than the windows one.
Re:Monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It will work... (Score:4, Interesting)
It won't work everywhere.
Some older friends of mine just ordered a new Dell, and they paid the extra $150 for XP. They did ask my opinion first, but I only told them that I too would pay extra to get XP over Vista if I had to run windows. They made the final decision themselves.
This wasn't some high end system either where $150 was a drop in the bucket. It total price was $900, including the XP fee.
Re:It will work... (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:It will work... (Score:4, Interesting)
I got an Acer Aspire One a month back. The hardware that I wanted (on sale at Staples) came with pre-installed XP. I booted it up that way once to make sure that the machine worked, then deleted XP and installed Fedora 10 on it. But I suppose my purchase counted as a sale of XP and part of the price I paid for the laptop went to Microsoft, even though I haven't used any Microsoft operating systems since Windows 98 was brand new. (Tried it for a month, didn't like it, and switched to Red Hat Linux. Never looked back.)
Re:$150 is stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
"they can use the restore WinXP SP3 CD that came with the prior PCs"
Dell ought to lock their restore disks to specific machine ranges instead of just the basic "Dell Check". Even better if they locked OUT any DVD that didn't have a proprietary Dell boot sector. :)
That would deter using versions of Windows not supplied by the machine vendor, and make both new computer purchases and Linux more attractive.
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...
Want me to "upgrade" to Vista? Dump the DRM. (Score:3, Interesting)
If MS wants me to upgrade to Vista, I'll do it, once they make it an operating system suitable for general purpose computation.
That means dumping the DRM. I don't want to "take advantage" of any "premium content" on my computer in any event. If I want to, there are other ways to ensure a "premium experience" that I can do myself. I' don't mind "activation" and all that BS, but once the OS is licensed, butt out.
Bottom line: I don't trust an OS that doesn't trust me.
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.
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll bite. But first I'll put myself in context: I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy on slashdot, hell I even used to type M$ when I was younger. I use Linux where it suits and Windows usually when I have to. I was deeply skeptical of Vista for months, probably years up until its launch, but about a year ago I wanted to get a tablet PC. One thing Vista offered me was very good and integrated tablet functionality, so I figured I could try it out and if I was not happy I'd change back to XP tablet edition. So I was mightily suprised when I found that vista had nothing wrong with it at all. Nothing. Using it was like using XP, but with improvements. So there is the context for my ensuing diatribe, I'm not a shill or fanboy.
Indexed search is integrated into the start menu, the control panel and Windows Explorer. Where certain features are placed now is entirely irrelevant, you just search. Say you want to change some obscure thing that is buried deep into half a dozen popup menus in XP (and Vista), open control panel and start typing, it will come up immediately. Item descriptions can be used as search keywords. Same goes for installed software and your files for that matter, you don't go hunting through three levels of start menu, you just start typing and it pops up. You can even add your own metadata to files if they are not responding to the search terms you want them to, and expand the indexed areas of your hard drive if need be. The use of indexed search so uniformly across the UI is probably the biggest improvement in productivity for me, it is incredibly useful and I would never, ever go back.
Now if you are going to respond "well I like using nested flyout menus for launching applications" (as many people do) then you are a lost cause to begin with (and vista can be set this way). But I'll be 400% faster at achieving just about any task in the OS than you are, and thats called productivity. This nested menu paradigm is being left behind by all OSes, because it is inefficient and arbitrary. I run Xubuntu on my netbook, and I installed deskbar as soon as I set it up so I can have indexed desktop search. On my XP machine I use Launchy for the same reason.
In Windows explorer now, lets say you are four folders deep in the directory tree, and it doesn't come close to fitting inside that column. In Vista it scrolls horizontally left and right as you move your mouse over different areas of your directory tree, so you can always read what the folders are by moving the mouse over them. Its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. The directory path in explorer is now replaced by a list of the folders through which you are nested, like: Computer > Local Disk > Users > User > Documents. But you can click on each of the arrows in that list and it displays a dropdown list with the contents of that respective folder. So with two clicks you can go from your current folder (Documents) to say Program Files which is on the local disk. Its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. If you don't like it you click on the icon and your path comes back.
In Vista you get preview popups of each window you have in the task bar, minimised or not. This means that I can be copying a large file or burning a disk and navigate away from this window, do som web browsing, and I can constantly check on the progress of my operation without switching windows. Again its not revolutionary, its just a nice feature. Compiz has it, and probably OSX if I ever used that particular os.
The truth is there is a pervasive irrationality to Vista hatred. Most people I encounter who bang on about Vista and its problems have not used it more than once or twice. Most people seem to take the initial offense anyone gets to doing things the slightest bit different and extend this into some huge reason why Vista is a total failure. I don't like using XP any more, it has a clunky interface that slows me down, I can't search when I feel like it in different contexts, and that annoys me to no end. N
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.
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?
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Anything that uses the system registry. Microsoft 'helpfully' redirect it. Ditto Program Files.
Not if they're coded correctly.
Applications that *wrongly* try to write into nodes of the registry they shouldn't have access to will have their registry entries redirected. Applications that attempt to write into the Program Files folder (also *wrongly*) will get a "spoofed" Program Files made for them elsewhere.
These applications were broken in Windows XP; they were broken in Windows 2000 Pro; they were broken in Windows NT4. They've been broken for decades, the only difference is that Microsoft is now having the OS enforce its own multiuser rules.
What's really sad is the developers who go WAAAY out of their way to do stupid shit to make their product work, when they could just change a couple folder entries in the first place. Blizzard is guilty of this; instead of just moving their WTF and UI folders to the correct location, they actually move *the entire application install* into the /Users folder. It's hard to even fathom how anybody who considers themselves a "Windows developer" can be that dense. http://blakeyrat.com/2008/11/02/world-of-warcraft-updates-and-the-definition-of-half-assed/ [blakeyrat.com]
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
If you never run a program that loads HUGE.DLL, then those 5 seconds will have never been amortized, ie you have *lost* 5 seconds of computer time each time you reboot by loading useless baggage. If you do run a program that loads HUGE.DLL, then you've only broken even. If you do run two programs that load HUGE.DLL, then you haven't gained anything from precaching that would not have been gained by ordinary caching anyway, so again you've only broken even.
The vast majority of people wait in front of the computer while it boots, and certainly notice the extra HUGE.DLL loading time.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
You could try backing up your files. Did that ever occur to you? Mozy is like $5 a month, seriously.
Anything important I have at least 3 copies of - 2 onsite and 1 offsite. However I don't back up to some 3rd party site I have no control over. THAT is awful advice especially coming from someone who decides to be critical of another person without getting all the facts. I ***COPY*** the files onto removable hard disks. You see my problem, if disk copy is flakey???
Re:It will work... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does the OEM downgrade come with an XP OEM CD, or a Dell half-assed "only works on this particular product line" restore CD?
For $150, I'd much rather have an XP Pro OEM CD [tigerdirect.com] that's not tied to a Dell Computer. This way, when the computer eventually dies in a couple years I can install on my new one.
An important point (Score:2, Interesting)
An important point not really mentioned much is that, from what I can see, this is an increase in the amount that Dell charges to do it FOR you. The right to downgrade still comes with an Ultimate or Business license...you just have to provide your own install media and contact Microsoft's activation hotline to get an install key.
At least, that how it was a few weeks back...MS tends to change licensing rules a lot...