$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."

Comments

Re:Downgrade?

[tambo]

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.

Re:Downgrade?

[TheGratefulNet]

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).

Re:It's like divorce

[Jhon]

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.

Re:It's like divorce

[ohcrapitssteve]

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.

Re:It's like divorce

[Peet42]

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.

Re:It's like divorce

[mrchaotica]

A piece of software is in no way "your own property", just like every other piece of Imaginary Property.

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!