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Dell Will Offer XP Past Cutoff Date
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, brings news that Dell will be offering Windows XP pre-installed on their computers past the June 30 cut-off date. Computers purchased with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate past June 30 will come with a copy of XP Pro. Dell plans to simply install that copy upon request to save users a step. Perhaps this will help Microsoft officials make up their minds about another extension.
This is absolutely ridiculous. I honestly do not understand why people are so in love with an old crap OS like XP. I've had more stable installations of Windows ME. Actually, I never had a bad Windows ME installation. I felt it was more stable than XP. I also feel the same way about Vista. I love Vista. Sure, there were some annoying issues... 14 months ago! But I have 0 issues now. Don't get me wrong, I like XP better than any Linux distro I have ever tried (including the newly released Ubuntu 8.04, which I installed on a machine earlier today), and I've been using them off and on for years. And don't even get me started on Macs (though I somewhat like OSX). Hardware issues have never been an issue with my getting Vista to run on a machine. That includes on P3s and a 6 year old P4 I have at home. I only keep XP around for development testing as I know too many people are afraid to upgrade because of all the negative hype. My take is that all the Vista haters were/are probably Windows 2000 lovers, which is, in my honest opinion, the worst, absolutely most unstable, operating system the world has ever seen... but I digress. Windows XP is well past its prime, and I see nothing in SP3 worth delaying an upgrade. Vista has been OEM'd for 1 1/2 years now. I find it inexcusable that any company would not have updated their software by now. And I no longer feel that hardware issues are a viable complaint anymore (well, at least not by the end of this year), either. Especially for those buying new machines. Most any current machine is plenty powerful for Vista. And, when you buy a new machine, you should really consider future proofing yourself, by purchasing a better machine than is "necessary". And realize, that computers should be routinely updated. Every 3 years is more than long enough. Even if that means only more RAM or a better video card, that could easily push out most machines to the 5 year mark. Anything older than that and you have no right to complain. And this is coming from someone who has a machine that old that I still use for everyday computing. My laptop is 2 years old and only a "Vista Capable," but I still make it work. I have that machine dual booting XP & Vista with Vista as my primary. Many of the complaints about Vista are that it requires "too new hardware." Well, I'm sorry, but if you are saying that you expect an OS to not take advantage of current graphics technology, then I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for your obvious mental deficiency.