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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."
So, when I get the PC home do I get to not accept the EULA, and call for a rebate of the cost of Vista + the $20-$50 more I payed for my "downgrade?"
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
If it's a "Downgrade", shouldn't it be *CHEAPER*?????
It's a "downgrade" only because Microsoft wants to preserve the illusion that Vista is better, and the pricing is set to discourage people from buying it.
But, yes... a significant share of the consumer market, and practically *all* of the informed market, consider XP a vastly improved upgrade over Vista.
I've been using Microsoft OSes since MS-DOS 3.2 (circa 1988), and I've never been nearly as frustrated, disappointed, and often outraged by an OS as I am with Vista. I've been using it for two months, and it's horrid in many, many aspects.
I have been making a list of irritations that are novel to Vista. Every time I run across some new irritant, I pop open this text file and add a line to it. I am also making a list of Vista features that I have turned off because they are buggy, poorly implemented, resource hogs, unsecure, frustrating to use, etc., etc. They are both very long lists, and they continue to grow.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Or she's cheating on you.
its supported until 2011 or something really crazy like that.
by then, if the world is STILL on MS platforms, well, we have worse things to worry about than xp running out of support..
there's no compelling reason at all to embrace vista. none. xp won't stop working all of a sudden (well, not any more than usual) and its supported via patches for quite a while to go.
after that, its linux, freebsd, mac. MS is losing share every month. I know NO ONE in the corp world who wants vista and even home users are rejecting it.
MS is on borrowed time, at least in terms of their OS.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
and doesn't come encumbered with a ton of DRM crap
its all relative, isn't it?
compare win2k that had NO activation and you could copy the system disk from one box to another and it would work fine (if the hardware/kernel were compatible).
I am forced to use an acronis (or similar) tool to dupe my system disk. that hurdle should NOT exist but XP sure does like to stop you doing things you need to, at the system level.
not to mention activation, which kept a lot of people OFF xp and made win2k the last 'great' os from MS.
the only useful xp is a corp edition (non activation), sp2, pre-WGA. all others are bolloxed-up. (fwiw, at least SP3 on xp didn't turn on WGA on the corp version I tested it with. so a corp SP2 with SP3 update still seems 'mostly safe' to use).
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You are a sucker. I've purchased two copies of Vista. One retail and one with a new laptop. In the license agreement that came with both of them, there is a clause that allows you to use Windows XP instead of Vista. No need to pay extra.
I would have paid $50 to have Win98 installed over ME a number of years ago. It's somehow comforting to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
That is pretty funny, but interestingly enough, the original XBOX360 dev kits were Apple G5s (IBM PPC 970) running some kind of NT kernel. At some video game industry shows, playable game demos were actually running on Apple G5 workstations.
So it's $50 for labor?
Is this for real? Any copy of vista you pay for you can take an OEM CD of XP and install it and you're legal?
What code do you enter when it asks? The one for the vista install? Does it activate? Who has done this?
Most people will have a copy of XP around, probably OEM. I have a CD for pro and home, so this may just make the vista thing a non-issue. You're still buying a copy of AN operating system, there's just an extra step of the format/reinstall to fix it.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
An Atari 7800 still provides some of the best home arcade experiences short of a MAME cabinet.
If you focus on how much fun you can have, instead of whether you're pushing the most polygons through your video card, then linux is a nice option for gaming. No matter what genre of game you like most, there's something for you on linux.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No you don't. You get disks for both, but you can still only use one or the other. Can't use both at the same time.
That shit is all you, John the Bartender Marriot. What's M$ paying you to stink up the place like that?
Look, I'm not trying to dis Linux or anything. It's great for work or casual browsing any email.
But for games, umm, how do I say this tactfully?
1. the "you have more games than were released for the Atari 7800 (60 titles) and Virtual Boy (22) put together" doesn't say much. Both were flops and had pitiful numbers of games release, compared to any other platform. And even less original games. So it's a bit like saying that a drink tastes better than diarrhea. Or that a movie was more entertaining than root canal and a kick in the nuts put together. They comparison point is so low, that it doesn't really say much.
Now if you could compare it to the Atari 2600, or NES, that would be something.
2. I've seen the list of those 42 top commercial games, and I even commented on that story. I'll even raise you about a dozen more Loki ports, and a few commercial adventures that work well in ScummVM.
Nothing against them as such, kudos for porting them, but some are as much as 10 years old. My idea of having a gaming rig is more along the lines of, dunno, "I wanna play Age Of Conan which just got released", than like "I wanna play Knights And Merchants which I've already played in the 90's. And thought it sucked." Or much as Quake 3 Arena was a fine game for 2000, let's face it, there's a very limited number of people who still play _that_ online. You get the idea.
3. The free games... well, I've _tried_ a bunch of them. Yes, not all are Tetris clones. Pingus is a clone of Lemmings (an 1991 game) and the copy I tried, never had more than the tutorial levels. Some are clones of Missile Command (from 1980), the most notable of which being probably Penguin Command. Some are clones of Arkanoid (1986), and no matter what twists you give them (e.g., Briquolo), it's still f-ing Arkanoid, you know? Ditto, replacing the cute little dinosaur with a penguin doesn't make, say, Frozen Bubble be anything else than a clone of Puzzle Bobble / Bust-A-Move from 1994. I can even think of a moderately passable clone of 2D Mario games from the 80's, namely SuperTux. Etc.
I've seen very little in the way of original games there, and even fewer that don't look like old ass. Sorry, _classic_ ass.
Now I can't have any demands there given that they're free. I can see they couldn't afford an army of graphics artists or a celebrity game designer. I know that. Thanks for the intention, guys, and all that. But being that I'm not exactly below poverty line either, I'd really rather pay for a commercial-grade game.
Look, again, I'm not trying to put down Linux across the board. But for the narrow domain called "video games", it wouldn't really be my first choice. Sorry.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
have been making a list of irritations that are novel to Vista.
Please post it in your as-yet nonexistant slashdot journal!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The difference is, nobody was offering Win98 for $50 more back then.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
My father is sitting in a chair for the next two months due to a broken heel. I bought him a laptop directly from Lenovo. They had a great sale for Fathers Day (25% off). Their standard install was Vista Business. The downgrade for XP Pro was $22.
May I please have my frontal lobotomy if I bring back the ashtrays?
It may just be me, but *every* Micro$oft default in XP needs to be reversed before I can live with it. And, while it's not as bad as Vista, it still has the occasional habit of asking "Are you sure you want to do that?" and when you say "Yes" it'll do something, but quietly revert to its previous default after a reboot. It was the first generation of "Micro$oft Knows Best".
And it's a fallacy that XP runs significantly more packages than 2000 does. It's just that Micro$oft rewrote their installers to check and exit if they were run under 2000. I have successfully installed and used several "XP Only" packages under 2000 by using a hacked set of installer DLLs.
I think you're confused; My copy is my property, and the claims that it isn't because it's Imaginary are just that: imaginary themselves!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I would love to hear about gamers running a rock-solid gaming session for a week.
Gamers run their games for somewhere between 12 and 18 hours at a time. That's a SINGLE application most of that time.
If desktop PC Windows users only ran a single application all day long, they would probably ALSO have rock-solid results. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Instead, they usually run a dozen different apps no including the multitude of other programs that run in the background from start-up to make things easier or appear faster in some way. This is not to mention the programs that are put there unintentionally by drive-by installations via hijacked web sites.
Much of this, they can claim, is not Microsoft's fault, but then again, most of the problem with Windows is that Microsoft has bloated their operating system to maintain backward compatibility with broken apps... that, however, is Microsoft's fault because the apps are broken, not Windows even if Windows is the enabler to allow that to persist. (Microsoft would be far better off keeping an archive of patches for the apps, but that brings other legal issues into the picture.)
Gamers are the LEAST likely to suffer from software problems because of the way they run and use their machines. They are the most 'disciplined' users of all, in actuality, because not only is their software and application selection very limited, they are also highly conscious of performance and are therefore much more careful about their software upgrade/update and installation practices.
In short: Gamers are better users. You are summarily disqualified from using yourself or your systems as examples of "average" or "ordinary" computer users or usage.
In actual fact, it worked out really well because I found a seller on eBay who resold new Dells that were cancelled orders from their customers - I got a brand new XPS 1710 from him, precisely the same spec as I'd asked Dell for, with XP on it and for £999.
The point I'm getting to is that Dell is taking the "easy" way out by doing this - they're still buying Vista licenses which keeps Microsoft happy but giving customers who want XP the chance to have it. Presumably the additional $50 covers the cost of installing it and/or the additional XP license.
In actuality, they're gutless, just like other PC hardware vendors. The fact is that Microsoft needs PCs as much as PCs need Windows, then the same vendors should stand up to Microsoft's bullying tactics and demand that MS supplies them with XP to meet the customer demand - it is NOT up to Microsoft to dictate what PCs are installed with.
So, yes, what Dell is doing does meet customer demand but it's a gutless, cowardly tactic because they're afraid to stand up to MS.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.