Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Windows Operating Systems Software Microsoft The Almighty Buck News

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.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Vista To XP Upgrade Triples In Price, Now $150

Comments Filter:
  • by slifox ( 605302 ) * on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:33PM (#26113157)

    Blackmail is such an ugly word...

    I prefer "extortion." The "X" makes it sound cool

    • Re:Bender sez... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pm_rat_poison ( 1295589 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:14PM (#26113583)
      It's not Blackmail, it's a business model: Get paid to sell your software and get paid NOT to sell your software.
  • It will work... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by riceboy50 ( 631755 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:35PM (#26113173)
    Most people believe that Windows is synonymous with computers. Being the consumer sheeple they are, they're going to go with what hits their wallet the least—especially in a depressed economy.
  • by ceeam ( 39911 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:35PM (#26113177)

    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.

  • I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PoiBoy ( 525770 ) <brian@poihol[ ]gs.com ['din' in gap]> on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:38PM (#26113201) Homepage

    Honestly, I don't know what all the resistance to Vista is all about. I've been using it everyday for the past 18 months plus, and I've never had a problem with it, and that's on what was a relatively low-end machine I bought three years ago. All my hardware works fine, it never crashes, and it's easy to use. It doesn't seem at all slow to me, either. And, yes, I also use Linux as my main computer at work. I just prefer Vista for its ease-of-use when I come home.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      I installed it at home. I got a new computer with >4GB of RAM. And MS doesn't sell XP 64 anymore, so I installed Vista 64.

      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.

      But all in all it's pretty good, and I could hardly see going back to XP now.

      Honestly, my biggest problem with Vista is that it appears MS is going to strand us Vista users and come out with Windows 7 next year with no afforda

      • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:11PM (#26113553) Homepage

        The UI is a ton better than XP.

        Can you quantify that? What tasks are quicker to perform? What functionality is easier to find?

        • Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)

          by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:42PM (#26113877)

          Launching applications is easier and faster:

          (1) press ctrl+esc to bring up start menu
          (2) press N (first letter of "notepad"
          (3) press O
          (4) press Enter (autocompletion)

          Five keystrokes, about 500ms, and way faster than navigating to it with the mouse. And similarly for launching most of the apps I use.

          To navigate to a network share that I used recently
          (1) ctrl+esc
          (2) \ (first character of "\\herbert")
          (3) \
          (4) h
          (5) down cursor key into the auto-completion list
          (6) Enter

          7 keystrokes, about 800ms.

          What functionality is easier to find? -- any installed application! e.g. I know that Windows Backup is installed somewhere, but I don't know where, and I can't remember if it's called "Windows Backup" or just "Backup" or "System Backup".

          (1) ctrl+esc
          (2) b
          (3) a (this is enough for the autocomplete list to populate)
          (4) enter (to launch it)

          What else is easier? Well, I judge what time to start the commute home by looking at traffic maps. On XP it involved clicking on my web-browser launch icon, clicking on the favourites menu, navigating to the bookmark that has the stuff, clicking on it, waiting 15 seconds for the page to load.

          On Vista, a snippet of that webpage is sitting on my desktop in the form of a Vista Gadget. Total time required to judge traffic conditions: 300ms, the time it takes me to look at that corner of the screen and digest it.

          • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)

            by rastos1 ( 601318 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:05PM (#26114095)

            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 ...

          • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)

            by Anthony_Cargile ( 1336739 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:25PM (#26114299) Homepage
            Windows logo("Super" key)+r launches the run dialog, then type the first few letters of a command - for example 'cmd', 'notepad', or 'http://$SITE' and autocomplete from there. This has been the case for at least since Windows 98, and even if there is no autocomplete on the OS the commands aren't all that hard to type.

            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) :D.
          • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)

            by Thaelon ( 250687 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:52PM (#26114525)

            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(!).

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by shaitand ( 626655 )

          The UI isn't better performing or less cluttered. It's prettier. How do you quantify prettier?

      • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

        by syousef ( 465911 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:23PM (#26114783) Journal

        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.

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:54PM (#26113381) Homepage
      I don't think Vista has a big stability problem, but it really is a resource hog. On my box, Vista eats up 1GB of RAM doing absolutely nothing, even with Areo turned off and all effects etc disabled. Compared to this, I can run on the same Box, Ubuntu 8.10 + Windows XP (inside Virtual Box) under 750MB, really no kidding. And that too with Compiz and every thing. Under Ubuntu I can run quite a lot of applications simultaneously without loading the box too much, while Vista is brought down on its knees even when copying big files around.
      • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)

        by TrancePhreak ( 576593 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:20PM (#26113637)
        that 1GB is a myth. It's just precaching all sorts of things in case you use them so that they become available faster. Should your computer actually need to use the ram for something, Vista will dump out the precached parts to allow it.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Vista is brought down on its knees even when copying big files around.

        I have to wonder whether this is because it is checking you aren't copying anything M$ thinks you shouldn't.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          Or maybe it's Norton Antivirus scanning everything every time it's accessed, even mpeg files, before it lets you read the file. Maybe it's worth disabling the antivirus software for 15 minutes to see how that affects file transfer.
    • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Quarem ( 143878 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:57PM (#26113415)

      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, Informative)

        by setagllib ( 753300 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:25PM (#26113695)

        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.

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pinckney ( 1098477 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:00PM (#26113445)
      I play mostly old games: GTA2, Diablo II, Sim City 2000, Age of Empires II... They're the only reason I kept Windows installed. Vista breaks most of them. I have better support from WINE.
    • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:09PM (#26113527)

      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.

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:12PM (#26113561)

      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:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AceofSpades19 ( 1107875 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:15PM (#26113585)
      define low-end machine. I define a low-end machine as a computer that has 512 mb of ram or so and a computer with that much ram can't run vista very well at all, unless you call booting in 10 minutes fast.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Matt Perry ( 793115 )

      Honestly, I don't know what all the resistance to Vista is all about.

      I never understood the resistance to New Coke [wikipedia.org]. It tasted fine to me and I drank it with no problem. But apparently many people didn't like it and complained. They wanted the old Coke. Fortunately, The Coca-Cola Company listened to their customers and gave them what they wanted. They returned to the old formula with Coke Classic and customers returned to buying their products. Nothing leads to success like listening to the customer and sel

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by syousef ( 465911 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:44PM (#26114907) Journal

      Honestly, I don't know what all the resistance to Vista is all about. I've been using it everyday for the past 18 months plus, and I've never had a problem with it

      The problem is your failure to understand that not everyone uses the same hardware as you and not everyone does the same things that you do on your computer.

      It's the same as the developer who closes a bug report with "Works on my computer".

  • Economics (Score:5, Funny)

    by Futile Rhetoric ( 1105323 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:38PM (#26113211)

    Well, since it's an upgrade, it's only fair that people should pay more, right?

  • Yohoho! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by calmofthestorm ( 1344385 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:40PM (#26113231)

    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)

    by Adrian Lopez ( 2615 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:40PM (#26113241) Homepage

    I can't wait for the Apple ads to make fun of this. People are willing to pay extra to avoid Windows Vista.

    • by XPeter ( 1429763 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:57PM (#26113419) Homepage

      This is how it will probably go :)

      Mac: Hello, I'm a mac

      PC: And I'm a PC.

      Mac: So PC, I heard that people are now paying THREE TIMES more for XP then they were before, just to avoid Vista!

      PC: Hold on a second Mac, I'm installing some updates and I have to reboot.
      Mac: Ok..

      PC: Alright be right ba-

      Stop 0x0000001e (c000009a 80123f36 02000000 00000246)
            Unhandled Kernel exception c000009a from 8123f26
            Address 80123f36 has base at 80100000 - ntoskrnl.exe

  • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:41PM (#26113253) Journal
    XP is three times more valuable than Vista.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:45PM (#26113283)

    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.

  • by senorpoco ( 1396603 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:46PM (#26113289)
    The biggest inconvenience is having to show up at a dell depot so the can bend you over a desk.
  • by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:47PM (#26113299) Homepage
    One reason people say Linux has a hard time gaining ground is because it's free so people think it's shit so it has to be given away.

    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)

    by Darkk ( 1296127 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:48PM (#26113313)

    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)

    by Bearhouse ( 1034238 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:49PM (#26113333)

    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....

  • holy shit (Score:4, Funny)

    by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @04:53PM (#26113367) Homepage
    is Rob Enderle right about something?
  • Monopoly (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mlwmohawk ( 801821 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:02PM (#26113475)

    This is something that can only happen when there is a monopoly involved. If there were a real and competitive environment, a vendor would not be able to do this to their customers without them choosing the competition.

    It is so bad, that they aren't choosing competition, they are choosing to keep their previous product. Its pathetic.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      You are aware that it is Dell who have chosen to up the price and not Microsoft? If it were Microsoft, all those netbooks running XP would suddenly go up $100.
  • An additional $150? (Score:3, Informative)

    by hilather ( 1079603 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:08PM (#26113511)
    Seems like companies will take advantage of the consumer at every chance they get. Obviously your laptop should cost LESS with Windows XP pre-installed as it is a dated product. Vista does have a few valuable features that I believe give it superiority over XP. Fast user switching in Domain environments is a big plus. Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol with their new VPN Client would be a huge bonus to corporate VPN users. However, these are the only two nice things I have to say about Vista, and honestly their is no reason these features couldn't have been integrated into Windows XP. While these features are beneficial to corporate environments, Vista is hardly a candidate for a corporate workstation. Regardless if you have been running Vista without problems, slap it on enough workstations and laptops, and you will begin to see the issues trying to support it. I use Ubuntu, although I was recently employed with a small company that wanted to keep up to date on Windows operation systems so I found myself supporting a number of Vista users. It was definitely one of the busiest jobs I've ever had.
  • by sgage ( 109086 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:19PM (#26113623)

    ... 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.

     

    • by PieSquared ( 867490 ) <isosceles2006@@@gmail...com> on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:18PM (#26114249)

      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.

    • by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:53PM (#26114535) Homepage

      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.

  • by vudufixit ( 581911 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:02PM (#26114063)
    Previous poster(s) hit the nail on the head... very little incremental cost, if any, to put XP images on their machines, vs. Vista unless MS' bulk price for XP licenses has gone up. I'm surprised that a handful of people have defended Vista as performing reasonably well, and stably. I fix and set up PCs for home users, and I have yet to see a Vista machine, whether bargain basement warehouse club cheapy, or high-end gaming rig, that didn't pause at odd, arbitrary moments during simple operations such as opening up a folder, or populating the control apps in the Control Panel. The performance issues I described are after I do a thorough performance tuning - putting it in Classic Mode, removing bloatware, using MSconfig to disable all startup items other than the security package, and disabling unncesessary services. I've done perhaps a hundred of my own vista ----> XP "downgrades" (Had customer buy an XP CD) and they've gone rather smoothly, resulting in far better performance. The thing I feared since the day after the official launch (the day I did my first downgrade), are manufacturers that are making OEM devices that go into system boards, such as sound, networking, etc without publishing XP drivers. So far, not so much, with the glaring exception of a Dell Studio laptop with a Broadcom wireless device for which I could only get Vista drivers.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:11PM (#26114155)

    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.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

Working...