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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."
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.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
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.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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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.