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Windows XP Still Outselling Windows Vista
nandemoari writes with an excerpt from an InfoPackets article that says "While Microsoft excitedly tries to sway public opinion by touting that Windows Vista License sales top 180 Million units, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was busy smacking Microsoft down — reportedly shipping PCs with a Vista Business license but with Windows XP pre-loaded in the majority of business computers sold since the June 30 Windows XP execution date established by Microsoft — casting a lot of doubt over how many copies of Vista have actually been sold."
OK, I'm a zealot, but if you mostly use a computer to browse the web and get email and write an occasional document buy a Linux computer.
They just raised it... Two weeks ago when I ordered 6 new computers for two different clients it was only a $50 upgrade to get it with XP pre-installed.
Oh well, you can always exercise your downgrade rights under the EULA and use a privious Dell OEM XP Cd if you have one laying around from previous systems, and still be legal without paying the Down/Upgrade tax.
business users like control, order and stability. the more business users evaluating linux, the more likely bugs will be discovered and patched, that give linux better features, furthermore, closed source development will evolve, and prosper, IBM already has worked many hours bringing lotus technology to linux, if it thrives and prospers, other closed source developments will follow, vendors will 'lock' into linux platforms based on the solutions available, and some of those solutions will be open source software.
as more business users get used to enterprise class linux solutions, more of them will turn to 'linux' at home as desktop users, some of those users will be talented high paid programmers, with pet needs, and will donate time and energy to free open source software, thus giving a direct payback to linux.
you might as well have asked, why did people use DOS when there was unix developing, or instead of CP/M. they used it because business used it. if business doesn't come back to windows tech, microsoft has lost control of the most important root to have control over. just as ISS never over took apache, microsoft will be in free fall if wide spread linux in the business is adopted.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I'm not sure that avoidance of Vista translates into good news for Linux. If you have a volume licence to install XP on your whole site, then regardless of what hardware you purchase in the interim, the deadline for switching is 2014 when Extended Support stops. They can sit on XP for that long, I'm sure, by which point the "Vista alternative" being explored will be Windows 7. If you're buying an OS licence tomorow, then getting something other than Vista is a priority, but I wonder how much of MS' business revenue that accounts for.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yes but two things:
1) XP was dramatically improved by code ported from Vista development (SP2, Windows Search, Windows Media Center, etc etc...)
2) Businessess are ALWAYS slow to upgrade. I have friends who work at fortune 500 companies who were JUST allowed to install Windows XP from Windows 2000.
If Microsoft hadn't backported a lot of their code for the good of XP users then Vista would have been a tremendously greater shift than it has been. Microsoft could have just said "too bad upgrade" but instead they actually minimized the reasons for people to upgrade in order to keep existing customers happy.
Windows XP isn't the Windows XP that shipped originally... it's a quasi-Vista.
A small company that my friend works for also preloads copies of XP and chalks up Vista sales. I wonder if Microsoft makes them do this or if there's some sort of incentive...
Nope, Any Dell OEM XP Cd shipped since 2000 will work on ANY Dell computer built after 2000. It looks at the BIOS codes... I routinely rebuild client computers and just use the first Dell OEM cd I grab that matches what version it has installed...
Used a Dell OEM XP Sp1 cd from like 2003 on a brand new Dell Laptop the other day after the person decided to open the box himself and go online before we installed antivirus or malware protection software...
Toshiba and HP do lock the OEM software to certain versions. And IBM and Dell lock the Server software to particular models, but not the XP home and Proversions.
You cant use an Dell cd on an HP box without having to call Microsoft and explaining and manually activating the machine.
Kindof ironic. Earlier this morning I got an e-mail from our IS people outlining the software policy of the school district (I'm currently working for a large school district).
IE7 was found to not have any compatibility issues with current software used so that is allowed but not mandated. Office 2007 seems to work ok, so they will be rolling it out or the compatibility pack updates "soon". And Vista was found to be not compatible, of little usefulness, and generally undesirable. Officially it is to be avoided and the district will look forward to upgrading to Windows 7 when it becomes available.
What this means to us, is that if a new workstation or laptop is requested by a user or their supervisor, and the district cannot procure a machine with XP, the request will be denied. Vista will only be allowed if the user submits a justification of why they need it (IE, have to run some software in the classroom as part of the curriculum that only works with Vista) and that justification is approved by their supervisor and IS.
From the latest Valve survey (Windows only):
Windows XP ------------- 80.77 %
Windows Vista --------- 15.08 %
Windows Vista 64 bit - 2.68 %
Windows 2003 64 bit - 0.70 %
Windows 2000 ---------- 0.61 %
Other -------------------- 0.15 %
So even in Windows Gamer Country, Vista has reached only 15% market share...
C - the footgun of programming languages
Playstation 2 still outselling Playstatoin 3
My own personal experiance with Vista is quite small, and shall stay that way. My little sister bought a brand new HP notebook right after Vista came out. The day she got it home, IE started crashing randomly when she tried to download stuff (Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM, you know, the regular stuff you download onto any new machine), so she switched to Firefox (yeah, your right, ie DID crash EVERY SINGLE TIME she tried to download firefox, imagine that) Once I got Firefox going for her (from a usb drive) she was able to start browsing the web without cursing every few minutes, but within another day or so she had called me up asking me how to fix any number of other things. Within the first week she had more problems with her BRAND NEW notebook than I have in a month with my 6 year old, half dead, piece of junk computer (with all the guts hanging out in true geek fasion) I got when I graduated high school. Everything she did popped up an error, or a warning, or one of those damned "Are you sure you want to perform this totally trivial act of copying a file to a jumpdrive?" messages. They can pry my old busted copy of windows XP out of my old busted computers cold dead hands!
i have a roll of electrical tape.
> this is true. they may just hit 3% market share in the uk before
> the end of the decade. woohoo!
I dunno, things are looking up lately. I know Amazon isn't exactly the first place people go to buy a computer but they publish a ranking chart in realtime. I looked at it yesterday and noticed some interesting figures on the laptop chart. These numbers are for the top 25 sellers:
Linux 9
WinXP 6
Vista 5
OS X 5
Even when you combine the Windows numbers you still have a very respectable 11/9/5 spread. And if you buy the Apple hype that OS X is a UNIX the Windows vs *NIX battle is 14 to 11.
The mininote has opened up a whole new front in the OS Wars. Of course if you ranked em by dollar volume Linux would be dead last since all of the Linux based machines are much less expensive than the fancy Sony and Apple kit.
Democrat delenda est
Read your Windows Licence.. Its not transferable or reusable on any PC other than the one it was originally installed on. (Unless you have some Volume License that states otherwise)
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Boy, that's sure not my recollection. I remember gamers coming over fast, way ahead of both corporations and casual users.
Might depend on what you played. My recollection is that Win98 hung on for ages after XP arrived, due to compatibility and performance issues.
Remember, Win98 used a tiny fraction of the resources that Windows XP required. XP required VASTLY more RAM and more CPU than 98 to reach even close to the same level of performance. (Sounds familiar to XP - Vista actually.)
So gamers hung onto 98 for quite a while, due to the increased performance, and shunned XP's cpu and ram bloat. Hell, by the time XP launched, there were still popular titles from big publishers (Ubisoft's Rainbow Six series, expansions, etc, for example) that still didn't even officially support Win2000 by 2002 (although with some coaxing and luck could usually be made to work.)
And hey you only had to double or even quadruple or even more the amount of ram in your PC and upgrade CPU's.
XP was such a win in gaming: more stable, better task switching, great backwards compat.
A year plus after it was launched maybe.
Sure there were driver problems, but not so bad, nor for so long. I don't suppose there's any data to really show how it went, prove either of us right.
Of course the driver problems weren't so bad, nor for so long. Windows XP was just Windows 2000 with a bit of a facelift. And in particular, for nearly everything, it used exactly the same drivers as 2k. So by the time XP launched, a huge chunk of the drivers had been released for 2+ years, if not longer longer because 2000 wasn't that much of a deviation from NT4.
LOL. Nasty updates? I run Debian and it's easier to update Debian than it is any Windows machine I've ever run, as well as having more options to do so. I can update via a gui with auto-notification when updates are available, or I can run the very difficult to understand two commands: "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get upgrade" and all security patches are downloaded and installed, without rebooting.
If I want to switch to the next version of Debian it's simply "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade". The same functionality is available through the gui too.
Now just tell my how "nasty" it is to upgrade a Linux system. I've upgraded a desktop of mine from starting with Woody, to Sarge, to Etch, to Sid and never had to do a reformat.
Now just go ahead and tell me one more time about how Windows has it all over Linux in doing updates and user-friendliness. You couldn't update directly from 98 to 2000 to XP to Vista if your life depended on it, let alone have it run smoothly and without any problems after the updates.
The depth of ignorance in this place about Linux simply amazes me at times. Geeks shouldn't ought to be that ignorant about technological issues.
Can I just add that we got an Eee Box B202 in for a customer this week and it was a sexy little machine. Atom CPU, 1Gb RAM, 80Gb HDD, 802.11BGN, XP. For a basic PC that can do office work and a little web browsing and such, this is a killer. At $499 the price is right too.
But even then, there is a fast booting mini-os that lets you browse the web without booting windows.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
The Windows machine that I keep around for those kinds of purposes has a retail box copy of Windows 2000 on it.
I don't need to read my Windows License. I know my rights.
Keeping XP on the old machines, reusing licenses
Yeah--if you're in the enterprise licensing program. But if you're not, you can't 're-use' licenses. XP OEM is licensed per-machine. If you buy a PC with XP pre-installed or buy an OEM copy of XP and install it on a PC--and then that PC dies, you can't go install that copy of XP anywhere else. (If the machine is still under warranty, you can get a replacement, with a replacement copy of XP and a new serial number...)
There's no place like
I don't see how anyone can say it's a "difficult" to see a blinking icon, put your mouse over it and read that you have updates available, click on the icon. then click on a button in the window that pops up that tells the system to update itself. That's easier than Windows update.
That's exactly the same as a Windows update.
Same AC again.
Nope. Debian's update-notifier isn't at all like Windows Update. I don't have a vendor scanning my computer to see if I'm "pirating" something, or installing something without my knowledge that will restrict my usage of my own computer. I've never seen an update from Debian that tries to take "ownership" of the computer during updates like MS has done so often. I have never once been told that if I don't accept a specific update I won't ever be able to update my system again either. No force, no attempted intimidation. Nothing along those lines. Just plain, old-fashioned, custumer friendly service from the vendor.
I think the above makes update-notifier far better than Windows Update. The user gets all the ease of use, but none of the negatives, and that puts update-notifier in a class far above Windows Update.
All that said, I use apt-get to update/upgrade the system and subscribe to Debian's Security mailing list to see what has patches have been released.
Oh, there's also two other areas update-notifier beats Windows Update hands down:
1. I don't have a "patch Tuesday" once a month. Debian patches every day of the week, and has a very good record of patching serious problems as soon as they come to Debian's attention. It's not all unusual to have released vulnerabilities patched in 24 hours.
2. I don't have to update all installed software separately from the OS. Debian patches everything in its repositories. Thus a vulnerability found in Python, any of my multiple media players, Wireshark, MySQL, Apache2, etc... i.e. all software installed using the Debian archives, gets updated right along with the OS. That's something Windows Update will never do.
In my book, that's far more user-friendly than anything MS has.
It's not a new PC, it's an upgrade. Same case, keyboard and DVD-ROM drive as it had in 2000. Isn't that why the key is permawelded to the enclosure?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
"MS Vista has twice the market share of OSX."
Which is quite frankly a pathetic figure given the fact that Vista comes pre-installed on just about every machine sold by a whole bunch of vendors (including HP and Dell, who between them account for about 57% of US PC sales), whereas OS X only comes pre-installed on Apple computers (8.5% of US PC sales).
No matter which way MS and their supporters try to spin things, there's something severely wrong when an OS that's been pre-installed on 90% of the PCs sold for for the last 2 years can only boast twice the user base of one that requires an expensive dongle from a minority manufacturer to run.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
.
The OEM Vista install began in late January 07. DX10 systems began entering the market only in late spring and summer of 07. XP has been around since August 01.
OEM Vista sales have been strongest at the Vista Premium level. That implies an investment in hardware equivalent to the mid-line Mac.
"The OEM Vista install began in late January 07."
But they began selling the Vista Express Upgrade scheme with OEM systems in October 2006. As MS used these in their original "we sold 60 million Vista licenses in the first 100 days" figures, it's reasonable for me to count October 06 as the day OEMs began selling Vista licenses to people.
"DX10 systems began entering the market only in late spring and summer of 07"
And this makes a difference in what way when most of the PCs sold are laptops, and the bulk of those have crummy Intel chipsets that can't take advantage of DX 9, let alone DX 10?
"OEM Vista sales have been strongest at the Vista Premium level. That implies an investment in hardware equivalent to the mid-line Mac."
The Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop with dual-core CPU (i.e. not the bottom-end celeron one) comes with Vista Premium, and is currently being sold for $599; the Inspiron 530 desktop with Home Premium is $629 with a 19" monitor. That's the price of a Mac Mini, which is the bottom end of Apple's range, not the middle of it, and as is the case with the Mini, both Dell systems use Intel graphics, so neither will gain any notable benefit from DX 10.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.