PC Makers Offering a Bridge Back To XP

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."

typo in summary

"It took took five years and $6 billion to develop"

Who's took? He must've been a genius to develop Vista with only $6 billion! :P

Re:typo in summary

I'm pretty sure just the marketing budget was more than 6 billion. The real price for Windows Vista is human progress.

Why hang on to the old?

Everyone should be running the newest of Windows, which is Windows Vista! People who still get by with XP are uncool and stick-in-the-muds. Windows Vista on a Wacom-enabled Tablet PC is the way to go! And Windows Vista to me seems much faster with the new wallpapers! I love Microsoft and everything they do. Products like Vista and Office 2007 are brilliant. I really have a mancrush on Steve Ballmer, too.

Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
I love Microsoft! I want a job at Microsoft!

Re:Why hang on to the old?

whoops, forgot to log on

Re:typo in summary

I'm pretty sure the typo was "downgrade" It should read "upgrade"

I've been out of it but...

I'm a computer-using professional, (a web developer, actually) and I haven't bought a computer in years (who needs to? a five year old Pentium IV does everything anyone needs a computer to do!). So I was amazed back in July when a friend and I went to a Circuit City and then Best Buy on a "cheapest laptop we can walk out with" quest. XP was already gone and the pimply-faced Nerd Patrol/Geek Squad/FireDog/CatFucker people all told us that installing XP on these computers was impossible. They said they'd tried and it couldn't be done. I remember wondering if perhaps this was the end of the Microsoft Universe, since there was no way we'd be getting a Vista computer. The only use for multiple cores and 4 gigs of RAM is if 80% of your CPU cycles are given over to DRM and Norton 360.

Re:I've been out of it but...

That all sounds good, but right now our hardware is way ahead of the software. The programs and operating systems aren't smart enough to make full use of the extra cores in the way you describe to get the real performance boosts that are possible. I'm sure that will change as dual and quad core processors become more and more common and eventually standard.

Re:I've been out of it but...

Again, I completely agree. The hardware is way ahead of the software. Fortunately, the video editing software I use does make use of the multi-cores (and it's a joy to watch the CPU performance meter peg at 80% on each 2.2GHz core). And Windows XP does have the ability to tie certain processes to a certain core (right click on a process in Task Manager, make the process Affinity choose a specific core).

I'm sure there are some kernel stuff that should go into Windows and Linux to optimize core usage better than it is now.

Re:I've been out of it but...

XP was already gone and the pimply-faced Nerd Patrol/Geek Squad/FireDog/CatFucker people all told us that installing XP on these computers was impossible.

Vic, those overglorified PC monkeys are yanking your chain. You have a number of OS choices. Fraggin' suits and their "unofficial" quotas...

As for XP being a "downgrade" from Vista, let's consider Merriam-Webster's definition of UPgrade:

: to improve or replace especially software or a device for increased usefulness.

Note the "for increased usefulness" part. Until Vista somehow offers a marked usefulness over XP, it's not going to be able to justify the price tags...ESPECIALLY Ultimate...

Re:They are lying.

Agreed.

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:I've been out of it but...

It makes good business sense for the PC manufacturers.

If they're seeing squawking clients in the valuable before-christmas season, they should do something. And if a downgrade to XP is what it takes... then so be it.

The manufacturers might be partners with miker$of when it is convenient, but a friend-coerced is a pretty fair-weather friend. I imagine that business arrangement works both ways and miker$of is under some pressure from stockholders to sell their product.

For the record to someone that mentioned a PC on which XP wouldn't run... I recently had to reload a spanky-new gateway *shudder* PC at the office. It had linux on it (which ran like a champ as a SERVER for HUNDREDS OF USERS (database, app server, web server, samba, DNS, and so on) and we were reloading it for a developer to use as as desktop. I know it will barely run Vista and make his life miserable.

XP won't run on it because Intel doesn't make (a working set of)drivers for the board's SATA controller. Not for XP. I tried Professional, Home, and even Server 2003 to make sure. Won't run. Bluescreens before you see the GUI. Tried both pre and post DRM versions (Original, SP1, and SP2 ++DRM). No XP "love". Looked on their website and they sorta support XP, but couldn't find a way to order one with that OS. (I was going to order one, clone the HD's magic partition, and take it back.)

The company didn't want to buy a PATA drive to put on a single chain with the UDMA66 DVD-ROM. I don't blame them.

I poked around both intel's and gutway's sites (which is kind of like sticking your hand in a public toilet by the way...) for an hour or two to no avail. Google-is-evil-ified the motherboard and SATA controller to see if anyone had other ideas. Lots of problems and no solutions later I ditched this idea.

Intel provides Linux support, why not XP? They have an XP driver listed, and I tried all 3 choices (which loads the same driver *sigh*), but still I get the friendly BSOD I know so well.

I won't rule out the idea that I might've missed something, but the probability is sliding fast towards nil.

I didn't have a copy of vista, and won't be having one. A glance at the side of the PC says that it is for Home Premium Two-Steps Left or some such version. Gutway doesn't do recovery CDs, putting the image on a recovery partition at the front of the disk for the client to burn. It evidently got erased before I received the PC.

as an annoying sidenote, the thing doesn't have a floppy drive, so I had to open the side of the case and connect a floppy before I could mash F6 to load a driver from floppy.

Anyway, I won't give the developer vista as he's already had the black feather pointed at him (the only one in the shop, because some of our clients downgraded to vista). He just looks pitiful when someone suggests he might be getting vista again. Everyone in the office has stopped teasing him about it because... well... it is meaner than tasering a mental patient in a wheelchair.

CE.

Well, yes and no

I recently upgraded my computers, my windows xp game machine from a P4HT and my linux dual P3 machine both to Core 2 Duos and 2gigs of ram. The windows machine used to have 1 gig of ddr and the P3 had 512mb of that ram that failed.

Both were okay machines in their own right, I am currently playing a lot of LOTRO and the frame rates weren't too bad with pretty decent settings. The problem was lack of memory, ddr is expensive compared to ddr2 and I had all full slots.

So, with two new machines, am I experiencing what you claim? HELL NO. For one thing, bios boot time (before the OS starts loading) have dropped to mere seconds, often so fast I can't even hit del fast enough. While the machines themselves idle most of the time, they respond a lot faster when I actually want them to work.

BRING OUT THE CAR ANOLOGY

If you drive you car one hour a day at 240 miles per hour (lets keep the math simple) then you claim that a car with a top speed over 10 miles per hour is wastefull since obviously on average your car only drives 10 miles per hour in a day period.

Computer speed is not just about total capacity, it is about how fast it can do the tasks you ask it to do. If I boot my computer, I wanted to work on it NOW, every milisecond it is not ready is wasted time. If I open a document I want to work on it. Don't matter that a 10 second load time ain't that long, it is time I spend waiting.

That is the secret of why powerfull computers make for better productivity, NOT because we need them to constantly be performing heavy workloads, but because we want them to do what we want them to do quickly so we can do our work in the flow we want it too.

I remember the days when if you wanted to print a document you went and got a cup of coffee while the computer got ready, and then you went an hour later to the printer room to get your document from the pile. It worked, but your workflow was being dictated by the hardware/software. Not a good thing.

BRING OUT THE SECOND CAR ANOLOGY

Old diesels had to warmup before they could be driven. Not too much of a problem, just make it part of your getting ready routine to go outside and start the car before you actually leave. But god, those petrol cars with their instant usuable engines were handy, and we curse when we have to scape the windows when there is frost. We want the car to be ready when we want it to be ready, not when its hardware is ready.

I agree that getting a new powerfull computer and then wasting all its cycles on crap is not progress, but just because a new powerfull computer spends most of its time idling does NOT mean it is useless. Same as your car that spends most of its times doing 0 miles per hour is NOT wasting all that horse power.

Re:I've been out of it but...

My sister just bought a laptop with a fair number of bells and whistles - webcam, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, portrait/landscape image flipper, and more. The machine comes with Vista preinstalled and although it comes with no reinstall disks it has a dedicated image partition with instructions on how to burn your own recovery disks. (pretty chintzy, eh?)

Naturally, she got an email from her university just after buying her laptop, saying that Vista is incompatible with many features on the Blackboard scheduling and class management system. I decided to install XP for her since she's more familiar with it anyway. No dice. Much of her hardware, including, surprisingly, her GeForce Go 6150 video card, has no Windows XP drivers developed! I searched for many drivers but could only find message board threads featuring questions about where the heck the XP drivers were. Long story short, my third attempt to recover the system worked and she's back to Vista.

It seems that she doesn't even have the option to revert to XP. I hope she doesn't need much troubleshooting (that's wishful thinking) because my few experiences with Vista have been befuddling.

FIVE DAYS?

Man, that is one slow machine.

Re:Expensive to develop, and worthless - Nice comb

did you go on vacation after installing?

Downgrade?

I wouldn't consider Vista to XP a downgrade. You end up with a faster box, better selection of drivers and less DRM. How is that a downgrade?

Limited Lifespan

How is that a downgrade?

Support for security patches and feature upgrades will end April 2009.

Artificially Limited Lifespan

corrected the subject for you.

Artificial How?

Artificially Limited Lifespan

How so? If someone contracted you to work for 90 days, paying you in advance, would you continue working past 90 days, for free? When those 90 days are up, it's not an artifical deadline, but a real one.

Non-MS Patches?

Support for security patches and feature upgrades will end April 2009.

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?

Comment summary:

The following comments will be posted by various people to this article

• Someone saying that this is the end of Microsoft's monopoly.
  
• Someone saying that the exact same thing happened with XP, and people will have to change over the next Holiday season.
  
• Someone complaining that their very common hardware doesn't work with Vista
  
• Someone saying that they have managed to get all their equipment running right out of the box with Vista, including some obscure piece of hardware.
  
• Someone complaining that even on a 2 GHz processor with 2 gigs of memory, Vista crawls
  
• Someone saying that people should stop complaining about Vista performance, because they got it working on a P2-266 with 128 megs of RAM.
  
• Someone saying that with Vista's failure, this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
  
• And someone saying that until Grandma can write an e-Mail, Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
  

All of the parties will provide various slightly off-topic and apocryphal anecdotes and statistics to support their position.

Re:Comment summary:

The following comments will be posted by various people to this article

You forgot one:

People who really shouldn't have bothered with the article, let alone the thread, will complain about what other people say about it. Personally I troll all those trolls who don't troll themselves...

Re:Comment summary:

I think your post can be applied to nearly all posts on slashdot, simply replacing Vista with X, where X = the subject of discussion.

Yeah but

Is that 6 billion in excel dollars?

According to some excel functions, that's really only 3,932,100,000.

About to "down grade" my laptop

Ok, I've been using Vista Ultimate (Yes, I PAID for it. Shut up already) on my Acer Ferrari 3200 lappy. Why? Two reasons.

1. Acer abandoned XP driver support on my laptop shortly after launch. I've had to scour the net for updated Wifi drivers from HP and other places that supported my ATI mobile 9700. Windows Vista OTOH, supported all my hardware on the first install.

2. I support Windows servers and desktops. I figured now would be a good time to learn Vista including all of its quirkiness.

How did it go? Well...Vista is a POS to be blunt. It's slow to boot up, next to impossible to access work group resources, application compatibility issues, and next to no 3rd party VPN app support. It's a good thing I kept my collection of XP drivers for this laptop, cause I'll be nuking the drive and loading an XP SP2 build within a month.

Re:About to "down grade" my laptop

No, they're rich because of an industry established OS momentum in place. I pay for their products so I can support them for other's who paid for them. As for the corporate user, they hate change and don't like the idea of an entire IT overhaul be it going Apple or Linux platform.

I knew Vista was going to be problematic. You know, typical Microsoft OS growing pains. I did *not* know how much of a PITA this Vista Experience was going to be. I gave it a chance above and beyond what feel is to be expected. But I'm sorry, I'm dropping Vista like a bad habit. It'll be better for my health too.

"down grade" your laptop? DO IT!

My own little experience with Vista...

I was happy enough with XP.

Then some mofo lowlife stole my laptop so have just been forced to get a new one. The shop said they "can't" provide machines with XP, so I was forced to use Vista (with hindsight I should have shelled out for a copy of XP and downgraded the machine).

The weird thing is, you can sense the stirrings of some actual respect for decent security underneath the glittering, laquer-coated turd that is Vista. But sadly, the actual implementation is just as bad as I feared.

My first 2 hours were lost just trying to get an ssh shell working again.

- cygwin doesn't run (easily) - file permission problems. Need to become Administrator to fix them.

- turns out that under Vista, just because your account is an "Administrator account", does not mean you are an Administrator. No, there is an actual Administrator (root) user, which has been thoughfully disabled.

- you can google plenty of instructions for turning on the Administrator account - but because I have the artifically crippled "Home Premium" edition, those menu options are simply not there. I eventually work out that I need to go to the dos box and type "net use blah blah". Finally I can log in as Administrator and change file permissions.

- despite all this, I still find I need to disable UAC to do things from time to time - and of course, reboot whenever I change it. But at least finally cygwin works.

Despite all of these new annoyances, MS has thoughtfully retained some of the quite annoying features of XP (and probably of the devil's spawns that preceded it). eg if you leave a network drive connected, then go to another network, then doing "file open" in an app such as Word freezes for a few minutes.

I think MS has had little choice in releasing Vista. Their bad designed decisions in the past - always favouring absurd "one click and its running" ease of use over normal security procedures - have come home to roost, forcing them to paint themselves into the corner they're in now.

Wheels coming off?

Are we finally seeing the wheels coming off of this tired old monopoly? This sounds like the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s, where nobody cared about the revolution anymore, nobody pitched their 'fair share' any longer, and the whole economy is collapsing.

MS seems to have been able to push crap out in the past. The only way they got away with it was monopoly position, user lock-in, favors of the press, and the ignorance of the general public about what computers were actually capable of, at the time when MS was releasing its features.

Seven years, how many thousands of programmers, evil genius and chair-throwing asshole at the top, and it's still not ready? Perhaps modern OS development is a task so complex that traditional human organizations -- the hierarchical corporation being the most powerful to date -- can no longer tackle it. Is open-source collaboration the next big thing in societal evolution?

Shocker?

The only difference between Vista now and in the beta stages, besides stability, is the system requirements for a well-running system. I was in no way surprised when businesses balked at the minimum system requirement. I can't tell you how many IT departments I've seen out there that have machines that run XP but only barely. Now, a machine that is a year old can't run the latest OS. Hmmm. If the average company would want to upgrade to Vista, they would have to make some massive capital investment to replace things that haven't completely depreciated in order to have IT just for the sake of IT.

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.

How bad is Vista?

Shopping with my mother for a new display to replace the broken one on Sunday, my mom pointed to a "Works with Vista!" sign attached to a LCD monitor and said "I heard that's (Vista) not very good". I was quite proud, and a little shocked, that quite possibly the most technophobe and technologically backwards person I know (my mother) was even aware of how bad Vista was, even if only through the grapevine.
 
That said, even with that kind of bad PR, Vista will no doubt make headay in to the market in 1-2 years time. It took at least that long for XP to really have good market penetration.... and by that time, computers should be able to run Vista reasonably.

Oh Lord!

Oh-oh. It's not good when a desktop OS's rep gets to the "mom can't e-mail" stage. That argument is usually employed against Linux distros (and rightly so, IMHO).

There's even a potential bumper sticker/T-Shirt market: "Even your mom knows Vista sucks."

Man alive, if that anecdote's even remotely true, it flat-out trumps the more technically oriented reports in indicating that Redmond is in serious trouble.

--
Toro

The Time Has Come

At some point even Microsoft's best-paid shills are going to have to admit that there's a serious problem, that Vista is not what Microsoft has come to expect from their business plan of periodic forced upgrades. I don't expect Microsoft to admit it, because it's marketing department is filled with well-paid liars, but somewhere in that behemoth in Redmond there must be some folks getting nervous.

I was assured by my Dell rep last week that XP will be available well into next year. I think Microsoft has a serious problem, and is finding that, at the end of the day, it is the one at the whim of the manufacturers and consumers, not the other way around.

Re:The Time Has Come

My take on it was that Gates realized that all the easy money to be made had been made, and there was no point, with his net worth, trying to make yet more money for Microsoft. Besides, at that point, with near complete market dominance, the only place MS had to go was down.

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.)

Microsoft doesn't care enough to improve

Unlike the Linux competition between distros, there is no real competition driving innovation within Microsoft Windows. They sort of notice it, but why bother? They'll continue squeezing blood out of the turnips forever even if they fire *ALL* of their development programmers and just retain a skeleton staff of maintenance programmers. Actually from what I've seen of Vista, maybe that's what they did. In terms of real innovations Vista looks and feels like it could have been done by a couple of guys in their spare time. Less innovation than between the three Linux shells I've tried.

Most of my experience has been with Ubuntu. Functionally, it does most of what I need right after installation. (I'm including the basically simple Flash, Java, and codec installations that really should be included in the baseline installation.) Most users want email, Web surfing, and basic document editing, and Ubuntu delivers all of that. On its own merits, it should have roughly half the market, except that it's cheaper, too, so it should have more than that.

What's wrong with this picture? The problem is that most Linux people have a cooks-first mentality, and when a regular diner comes along with a question or any comment except for extreme praise, the standard answer translates into "Why haven't you read the cookbook yet? The answer is right there." Well, the reason they didn't read the cookbook is because they just want to eat a tasty Linux sandwich, not to become a master chef.

There's nothing wrong with the open kitchen concept--but the Linux people keep trying to force people into the kitchen. Sorry, but my time is limited, and even though I made my living as a programmer for some years, I've had enough of it--and most 'diners' want even less than that. They just want it to work and help them get their computer-related tasks done.

Of course Microsoft's cooking model is a closed and locked kitchen, with no health inspectors and a complete waiver of liability printed on the back of your receipt--and you accepted all of the terms and conditions when you sat down at the table. However at least Microsoft is interested in the diners' money, even if they don't care about poison software.

Anyway, I'd love to see Vista flop in the dirt. I want some real choices, and most of the time I'm at work I'm forced to use Windows. Freedom is about real choice, and Microsoft is dedicated to eliminating freedom, no matter what their ads say.

Good thing

It's a good thing I decided not to pirate Windows Vista. That would have been embarrassing.

My one experience with Vista

So, I am a grad student, TA'ing a class in computational physics.

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 ... Vista Business.

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 ... ssh to a linux machine, so they can do their work. The *same* Linux machine, able to handle a dozen students numerically integrating shit without a problem.
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 ... run ssh badly. Lovely. And then the students submit their writeups as .docx's, and I have to fuss at them and ask for something I can read.

Re:My one experience with Vista

I wonder if my equally anecdotal success with Vista will get the same sort of mod points the parent did...

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.

Windows ME again?

I've heard some people say: "Everyone said the same thing when XP came out." That's bullshit. When XP was released, everyone here on Slashdot was saying: "Wow, this is actually pretty good; I haven't had a single crash; They finally delivered on their promise to release a consumer OS with the NT core."

Maybe in a few months Vista will be a good upgrade, who knows, but right now I can't see one feature that I want.

history

In the early 90's, MS nearly blew it. MS was pooh-poohing the Internet. Windows 95 was going to ignore the Internet-- the Internet wasn't important. However, Bill Gates realized the importance of the Internet, and singlehandedly turned the company attitude around. He "got it".

This time, with Vista, MS has blown it. They've been pushing DRM. They didn't learn the right lessons from the WGA fiasco. If all that Vista's DRM did was stop a few DVDs from being viewed or CDs being ripped for the 10 seconds needed to circumvent the protection, the DRM wouldn't be a big deal. But no, DRM is so deeply embedded in Vista that it casts its shadow on everything Vista does. Vista runs slower. Vista breaks more often. Hardware capable of supporting Vista's DRM schemes is more expensive. Security concerns have been deliberately conflated, with security for users from viruses being handled with less concern than security for MS and the MAFIAA from the users. And MS insults users' intelligence with lies about _all_ the security being for their own good. It's not possible to just turn off some sort of "DRM service" and have Vista just work, because Vista really is defective by design. In exchange for putting up with all those inconveniences, people receive in return less than nothing.

This time around, MS doesn't have Bill Gates in there, getting it right. He's busy trying to save the world from diseases. Laudable, and I wish him the best. But I wish he'd put some of these charitable impulses towards making MS kinder and gentler. I don't know whether Gates would get it this time, as he did in the early 90's. But no one else of consequence at MS is getting it right, and that's scary that a behemoth like MS can make such a blindingly obvious idiotic blunder. Perhaps corporations are inherently flawed systems in this way, susceptible to bad groupthink. They may wake up before they bleed too much. Sic transit gloria MS.

Revisionism

No, it wasn't Mr. Gates who "Got it." Gates was pushing MSN as an AOL alternative, as a standard closed environment separate from the internet. He was part of the reason Microsoft *didn't* respond to the internet in a timely fashion.

It was new kids coming in to Microsoft from college who "got it." It was the cover articles in Time and Newsweek who "got it." Microsoft only "got it" because they had no other choice. If they had followed Mr. Gates' plan, they would've missed it entirely.

Buys Linux time

The longer XP stays in circulation, the more time Wine, Samba, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Fedora DS, and a myriad of Linux producers have to target Windows. If Vista really has mass rejection by consumers and businesses, it buys Linux oh so precious weeks, Days, and hours, to try and overtake Active Directory.

Vista on basic machines is unusable

I bought a cheap (really cheap actually, NZ$600) Compaq PC the other day. AMD Sempron 3600+ with 512MB RAM, on board graphics, ethernet and sound and an 80GB SATA disc (where the hell they found that I don't know). It also came with a copy of Vista Basic so for a laugh I fired it up to see how it worked.

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.

Downgrades?

Downgrades?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Yet another downgrade ancedote...

I start a new job on Wednesday, even though I got the official "Welcome Aboard" on Friday.

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...

I have 3 laptops. 2 run ubuntu. The third, with vista, sits in a drawer.

Bad quality PR

Microsoft said: "We understand that our [original equipment manufacturer] partners are responding appropriately to a small minority of customers that have this specific request. But, as they have said before, the vast majority of consumers want the latest and greatest technology and that includes Windows Vista."

(emphasis mine)

That sounds horrible. Aside from their attempt on every second word to scale back the perceived failure of Vista, they know very well what they say isn't true.

To get mammoths like DELL and Lenovo to consider a "small minority" of customers so quickly, at the potential to sell overspecced machines loaded with Vista (something they waited patiently for over 5 years), then they're not a small minority at all.

One advantage Vista has over XP

With the release of XP, Microsoft started that delightful policy of dissuading manufacturers from including stand-alone install media with new computers (of the kind that frequently ends up on eBay). If you want to reinstall Windows, you have to use the system restore disks to reinstall everything, OEM crap and all, and we all know the only realistic way to get rid of all of it is to format your hard drive and reinstall the OS alone. I'm still toying with finding a warez copy of Home OEM and trying the product key on my old laptop's XP sticker and seeing if I can get that to work.

Vista, supposedly, has the same problem, but that little "Windows Anytime Upgrade" disk that comes with your new computer, conveniently (and undocumentedly, of course) works as install media. When I use it to reinstall Vista and use the product key on my new laptop, I always end up having to call Bangalore to finish activation, but it's still more than what I can accomplish with an OEM XP install.

With that said, I'd still throw on one of my retail XP licenses instead if I could find drivers for everything.

Windows XP licences on eBay

Original Windows XP Pro SP2 OEM packs with the installation CD and the product key / licence sticker are hot sellers on eBay. They're going for around GBP 50 (100 USD), while the Buy It Now price is up to GBP 75 (151 USD). Plus postage. See here:

http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=windows+xp+licence [ebay.co.uk]

Re:Bizzare?

To be fair, that's probably the fault of the OEM you bought from loading tons of crap and free offers on top of the system. A clean install of Vista Ultimate on an Aspire 5100 [acer.com] (1GB RAM) works just fine for me performance wise and I like it. I'm seriously doubting your claim of a 6 minute boot time too. Something is definitely wrong if you weren't exaggerating, and it's not with Vista.

Re:Bizzare?

(I also saw that 612 several times so perhaps it is a magic driver timeout number for Vista?)

Of course. 612 seconds ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:Bizzare?

I don't know about you guys, but when multiple pieces of software run slow on Linux, I blame Linux. Maybe that is because there is no OEM in the mix, but it seems fair to blame the operating system for not doing the necessary management to run my apps at a comfortable pace.

Re:how about a downgrade to ME

Not too long ago I heard Windows Vista referred to as "XP, Millennium Edition." Pretty much summed it up right there.

Re:how about a downgrade to ME

Not too long ago I heard Windows Vista referred to as "XP, Millennium Edition."

I much prefer "ME2", which associates with both Windows ME and the taint of AOL.

Re:Bizzare?

How about VirtualBox + ReactOS ?