What Does It Take To Get a PC With XP?

An anonymous reader writes "Christopher Null tried to buy a computer with Windows XP pre-installed on it from the United States' nine biggest PC makers. His findings: You can get one, but be prepared to fib."

Comments

That's Microsoft for you

[Anonymous Coward]

They are so friendly and customer-focused that you have to jump through hoops to get the product that you want. Why do we put up with this shit when we wouldn't accept this from almost any other industry?

Re:That's Microsoft for you

[iminplaya]

We accept this from almost every industry. Automobiles, appliances, internet services, telephone service, cell phone services(pay to receive calls? You all are nuts to swallow that), and most of all your government. Everybody complains like hell, but they keep on buying the BS.

Re:That's Microsoft for you

[wild_quinine]

They are so friendly and customer-focused that you have to jump through hoops to get the product that you want. Why do we put up with this shit when we wouldn't accept this from almost any other industry?

An industry related example: Good luck buying a power PC Apple Mac direct from the manufacturer. That's right - even if you ask really nicely, and even if they were still making them less than two years ago. It's an old product, and you can't get it any more.

A car analogy: Good luck buying a Jaguar XJ220 direct from Jag. It's an older model. They don't make them any more.

OK, so with software it's a bit different - 'making' them is as simple as copying the data, insofaras manufacture goes. But no company can make something and offer no help or support, period. That's not legal. If they want to lay old tech to rest, then that's their decision.

Yes, Vista is inferior to XP in many ways. Lots of new products are inferior to old products in many ways. If a company is done with a product, consumers do not have a right to force them to keep supplying it.

Re:That's Microsoft for you

[danbert8]

The problem with your car analogy is that you can still buy a Jag XJ220 used. It is illegal to resell old copies of Windows XP for use in new computers. Now if Microsoft were to allow that, it might not be such a big deal.

Re:That's Microsoft for you

[Hatta]

It is illegal to resell old copies of Windows XP for use in new computers.

The right of first sale has been consistently upheld by every court decision I am aware of. Do you know something I don't?

Re:That's Microsoft for you

[Lumpy]

cripes,. you can buy OEM copies of XP all over the place.

go to newegg.com and buy a oem copy and a mouse.

All done. Why did this even get to slashdot?

Re:That's Microsoft for you

[Roberticus]

When I worked QA in a dairy, we put cow's milk in the cartons. What we did not do was arbitrarily switch to putting soy milk in the cartons, and then require customers to call the grocery store and beg to get cow's milk (which would only be allowed if you were a restaurant).

Re:How is this difficult?

[TitusC3v5]

Or, if this DOES become a real problem, simply purchase a computer from your local mom and pop PC place. If they're anything like the ones here, they'll be happy to set you up with whatever OS you want, be it XP, Vista, or *nix.

Why purchase XP at all?

[Manip]

Alright this Vista thing has got a little out of hand. Here's a quick recap on events up till now:
1) Microsoft Released Windows Vista
2) Windows Vista failed to live up to people's expectations
3) People said "stick with Windows XP for now"
4) People complained about the normal driver and application compatibility issues
5) Somewhere along the line "stick with Windows XP for now" got turned into "Windows Vista sucks - stick with XP indefinitely."

So now we have people paying the same amount of money either way and going out of their way to pickup Windows XP. I could appreciate that position a year when issues still existed but those have all but gone today.

Vista is about as big of a leap as going from virgin XP to XP SP2. Meaning a few nice features but not really worth money. It has very few bugs and at least as many as XP currently does.

Windows ME was terrible. But let's be clear - Vista isn't ME. Because Windows ME was genuinely an unstable buggy monster as opposed to Vista which is just a very minor upgrade with a huge price tag.

Yes it eats more memory. SuperFetch converts all of your available free memory into better program loading times. These pages are marked so that they can be disposed of very quickly but when viewing a memory map it appears as if memory usage has skyrocketed.

Re:Why purchase XP at all?

[pherthyl]

>> Yes it eats more memory. SuperFetch converts all of your available free memory into better program loading times. These pages are marked so that they can be disposed of very quickly but when viewing a memory map it appears as if memory usage has skyrocketed.

I know the theory, but it doesn't work in practice (at least not on my machine). When the system uses so much ram that you're hitting swap, you lose. Whether that's superfetch or something else, I really don't care. I just know that XP uses about 200, while Vista uses about 500-600 on boot, and the Vista install is brand new. And when I open programs that RAM is not freed like the theory says. The system just ends up swapping like crazy, which slows everything down to unbearable speeds and eats my laptop battery.

Sure I only have 1GB of RAM. But that's plenty for XP and plenty for Linux, so I'm not inclined to spend money on hardware to run an OS with zero advantages.

Re:How is this difficult?

[Hatta]

It's not hard. You don't have to lie. You don't have to be a business to order it. And you can order it through the website without having to speak to a sales rep. (though you can also ask for it over the phone)

But you do have to pay extra for it, which is worse than having to lie to get it.

Re:Obvious answer?

[neokushan]

If you're buying your first computer, are you really going to know the difference between XP and Vista? Are you really going to MISS XP enough to want it that much?

Re:That's a *monopoly* for you

[dwandy]

Interesting pick, the XJ220, 'cause the way I read it, the XJ220 is Jaguar's Vista except that Jaguar isn't a monopoly that could force everyone to buy this over-priced turd.

So we see in this example the difference - when you're a monopoly, you sell crap and people have no choice. Jaguar on the other hand had trouble unloading their stock, and I'm sure people with half-a-million bucks to blow on car simply went and got Porche's, Ferrari's etc instead...

So to simply state that you can't buy an old model car is missing part of the point. I'm going to suggest that had the car sold well, it could well still be available today. Porsche has been making the 911 for many years and will make it for many more since it sells very well. Ford (for reasons beyond me) tried to replace the Mustang with the Probe and the outcry from the public resulted in the return of the Mustang - now you can't buy the Probe. Coke tried New Coke, today we pretty much have Coke.

There's plenty of examples in industry where successful companies respond to customer demand and sell them what they want, and when the company goes off the path they actually listen to their customers. This is because they have to compete with other companies offering customers an alternative.

Lucky for Microsoft they don't have such baggage to worry about. ...and this goes for most of the other examples I'm reading here like cell-phone and internet service providers. The lack of competition leaves a lot of power in the hands of the company to do what it wants instead of providing what the customer is demanding.