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$50 to Get XP On a New Dell
CWmike writes "Dell will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday, according to the company's Web site. Buyers of the low-priced Vostro line of desktops and notebooks will pay $20 to $50 more for Windows XP Professional installed as a 'downgrade' from Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate than they would for Vista only."
XP is smaller, faster, less buggy, and doesn't come encumbered with a ton of DRM crap. How is that a "downgrade"?
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Then how much would you pay for Ubuntu, which causes even fewer headaches than Windows XP as long as GNU/Linux supports your hardware?
Why, nothing of course.OCO is Loco
Forget about Apple Mr. Gates, you're doing a good job of self-destructing.
Signature applied for, Patent Pending
As in: "...can you just send me the laptop with nothing at all installed on the hard disk? I intend to install (Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSuSE) on it. No, I really don't want anything in the way of tech support outside of parts and labor."
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Then how much would you pay for Ubuntu, which causes even fewer headaches than Windows XP as long as GNU/Linux supports your hardware?
(there are many more ways, but yeah - it's worth paying-back that way, if not in other ways as well).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yet again we see proof that Microsoft has a monopoly. If there were real competition in the market, people would not be forced to bend over and pay more. There would be competition, Dell would have to offer it at the same price or another operating system would win.
Also, if there were competition, Microsoft would not have the economic ability to decide to drop a product that people wanted and force them into something they didn't. If I was a share holder and there was actual competition in the market place, I'd have the board and CEO fired for failing their fiduciary responsibilities.
But since they have a monopoly, there is no economic feedback.
It's only sad because MS spent 5+ years working on Vista, and now people want to pay not to use it. It's not sad in the more general sense, that people want to pay more to use a better product.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm still running Windows 2000 on the last Windows machine. It's so drama-free. No pushed updates, no annoying popups from Microsoft, no crashes in years.
You run Windows 2000. XP is tied to the mothership in Redmond. With Vista, Microsoft runs you.
I think this is a big part of the problem. When you have that kind of time line, the project loses focus. Remember all of the things that were supposed to be in Vista but were dropped along the way? There never seemed to be a clear vision of what it was supposed to be. It doesn't have to be that way. NASA certainly has shown that long term projects can have spectacular results.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"go back"? I'm still waiting for a compelling reason to upgrade from 2K to XP. Seriously.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Indeed, but for my $50 I would rather have a properly supported version of Windows 2000. It's all been downhill since there.
Considering NVIDIA is too lazy to put in a simple entry in their driver's .INF file so their newer mobile cards would work in XP I want to see how many of the newer model laptops could POSSIBLY downgrade without doing what I had to do - hack the .INF and get the deviceid in there so XP would see the hardware (8600M GS).
.INF file so their card would work under XP (since they ARE using a unified driver architecture and all for the very purpose of keeping things compatible across the board)
Seriously, people at NVIDIA must be REALLY LAZY to not include one line of code into an
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
For probably 90% of the people paying extra to get XP, that's functionally identical to getting only XP.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Soooo... two pieces of crap for the price of one?
This signature is lame.
If you refuse to take Vista do you get the $50 back? No? Then people are still paying $50 to avoid using Vista.
Yes, but Microsoft gets to say they sold a copy of Vista too, padding their sales charts.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
"Activation." (I.e., having to beg somebody for permission to use your own property.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
WinME is just the wierdest release Microsoft ever did, only one year after 98SE and a year before XP Home, both technically and marketwise. In retrospect I think it was the Golgafrincham B Ark of Microsoft developers, where all the good brainpower was transferred to the 2k/XP line while those too incompetent to bring on and yet not incompetent enough to outright fire were left on the 98/ME line. The bean counters wanted some ROI so instead of releasing a service pack to 98 and so WinME came to be. I don't think Vista can be described in much the same way.
That said, many people would use XP because it's XP and for no other reason. It has all the buttons in the right places and works exactly the same as it's "supposed to" work. Let others figure out the funny stuff for you, then you migrate when you need to. I migrated from 2000 SP4 to XP SP2, now I run XP in a virtualbox under Linux but maybe someday I'll upgrade to a Vista version too. Not today though, not tomorrow either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Dell sells you the box without any software or OS installed, and takes $50 off the price?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The fact is that DirectX runs in other environments, like Xbox and Xbox360. If all you're doing is gaming, then you shouldn't be surprised if your box is 'rock solid.'
1) Environments would not be the correct term.
2) XBox and XBox360 both run Windows- XBox is Win2K, XBox360 is XP x64.
This whole thread is based on the premise that Windows crashes, and reliability studies continue to show that since Win2k and XP, crashes are as rare on Windows as they are on any other OS. Vista so far is reporting to be even more stable than any OS, which is a bit surprising.
Windows stability issues is an old tale that needs to finally stop. People stopped bitching about Apple OS 9 when it was replaced with OS X, yet people still make fun of Windows based on the Win9x era.
Windows users don't see crashes, this is not the Win9x kernel era, the 'Windows crashes all the time' myth crap needs to stop once and for all...