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One Third of New PCs Downgraded To XP?
CWmike writes "More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, said performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software, which operates a community-based testing network. 'The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base,' Craig Barth, the company's CTO, said. 'People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights.' Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. Barth said things haven't changed since then. 'Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn.'"
Ordinary users expect stuff to work easily. Vista has an awful reputation in this regard, and it chews up more processing power/RAM and is slower than XP.
Every machine I've ordered from CDW has been preloaded with Windows XP, for which I thank them with my continued business. Vista has no place here.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
That depends on your opinion/needs.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Everything I've seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn
Or better yet - BURN THE BARN!
On a serious note, it is sort of sad that Vista has performed so poorly. I mean, I really enjoy Linux, but on my gaming desktop I'd like to have the best OS for the job (with DX10 if it's used). As a gamer, the whole thing put a sour taste in my mouth. I guess I can say I'm happy with Linux, but a bit sad that nothing useful came out of Microsoft's work, except for being able to lord it over them.
90% of users are Joe Sixpacks, and still 35% of them jump through the hurdles to drop Vista. It's hard to imagine what Microsoft would need to do to fare worse than this.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Subject says it all.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
and said that its OS is not going out without a fight!
Seriously, some variation of NT 5 is going to live for a long time, ReactOS is proof positive of this.
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
It boggles the mind why anyone would want a low to mid range laptop to come with Vista preinstalled. And yet that's the only way to get them (reasonably).
And apparently Toshiba's only honouring the warranty now if none of the original bundled software has been removed. So a friend of mine ended up buying a cheap Toshiba, with the understanding that it functionally has no warranty, since he's immediately nuking Vista off of it.
I bought my laptop with the intention of downgrading to Windows XP for increased stability and performance.
I was shocked, on the other hand, to find that there were no Windows XP drivers and that inserting the Windows XP CD and booting from it caused a BSOD before the installing starts. I have an HP Pavilion DV5-1002NR.
Do not purchase this laptop if you want to use Windows XP on it.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
How come no one is talking about the new version of Windows called Mojave? It looks great, and has little utilities called gadgets ... I love Windows Mojave. I give it a "10"!
How is XP a downgrade?
I'm not a Vista hater. I actually like it better - it's UI for explorer (folders) is much better and I like that, unlike XP Home, UAC is in every release of Vista. I think the security is also better but not great yet -- services shouldn't run in administrator level but just be sandboxed to their own account.
But it is dog slow out of the box for many computers with integrated video chipsets (why some manufacturers don't set the Aero level appropriately for their models is beyond me). It takes up too many resources of low-end computers. And Microsoft has gotten way too version happy - 12 versions IIRC (counting 32 and 64 bit seperately). Microsoft is also squeezing wallets for truly inane things - I can't even get 64bit business upgrade easily when I have 32 bit business even though such an upgrade should be minimal costs (somehow my disc doesn't count for alternative media...).
Why is this? I don't know if it's peculiar to Vista, but it really pisses me off when the computer decides that it will restart in T - 10 minutes just for a security upgrade and there is nothing I can do about it -- which pretty much summarizes how Microsoft is treating the customer base in a lot of decisions.
No wonder Macs are starting to get popular on the high end and Linux is starting to get popular on the low end mini notebooks. XP sucks in a lot of regards security-wise, but at least it's small and fast and there were only 2 versions of it for a desktop and all the Apps work on it (Endicia Dazzle still isn't 100% Vista ready...)
But! But! Microsoft did that thing, and people said Vista is great if we don't tell them it's Vista. Clearly the solution is to rebrand Vista as XP and in two months, like a magician, whip the cloth off and go "Aha! You've been using Vista all along!" There is no way a plan like that could fail!
God, this feels horrible, but I have to defend Microsoft/Windows here a bit
Windows 98 was slower than Windows 95, running on the same hardware
Windows XP was slower than Windows 98, running on the same hardware
Windows Vista is slower than Windows XP, running on the same hardware.
Does anybody see a pattern here? Most people thought XP was rubbish for the first couple of years that it was out for, and now those same people are proclaiming it to be Microsoft's best OS to date.
Vista does a lot of things right, and improves on XP in many, many areas, it's just dogged by this idea that it's crap because you can't run it on your P3-800 and it won't work with your dot-matrix printer from 1977.
Ugh, that felt terrible, I need to go play with Ubuntu for a few hours now....
Somehow I suspect this might not be legal, since the warranty is ostensibly to cover the hardware. Wasn't there a /. article some months back about exactly this kind of issue, and how voiding the warranty on computer hardware for changing the software wasn't legal?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I'll lay this out for everyone simply and clearly:
Windows XP Service Pack 2 had massive failure rates after its release. This was something which was supposed to be caught during the beta program (silly things like activation being permanently fried and boot bluescreens). There were numerous installation errors which were unrelated to antivirus programs as the team had specified (in fact, a heavy number of these install failures came from machines with no AV or with the AV disabled).
Fast forward to the Vista beta during 2005 and 2006. The same manager (Paul Donnelly. pauldon@microsoft.com) led this beta program through a trip of elitism and hell. Some testers would be massively rewarded for sucking up while others would have nasty bugs closed as being "by design" (including a number of major DWM CPU usage bugs).
The same coordinators managed the same two beta programs, leading to the same results. Paul and his team need to be canned, because they're not doing anything right.
"really pisses me off when the computer decides that it will restart in T - 10 minutes just for a security upgrade and there is nothing I can do about it"
Try shutdown /a (run shutdown /? to see all options available) from command prompt. Not tried on vista, but at least on 2003, that's the command to abort a system shutdown.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Claim that you're purchasing the computer for a company.
I hate to break it to you, but you've stumbled on Mojave. Server 2008 is Vista to the core, minus some of the flair.
ALL of those oses prior to Vista have brought something to the table that wasnt there before themselves.
vista, brings NOTHING, except drm. therefore people are not tolerating the slowness.
Read radical news here
The simple, long term test is whether software companies optimise their work for XP or Vista, given the choice. In the absence of a more popular OS the developers will concentrate on the most used variant of any give group. That's the best measure at the end of the day.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
"Windows 98 was slower than Windows 95, running on the same hardware
Windows XP was slower than Windows 98, running on the same hardware
Windows Vista is slower than Windows XP, running on the same hardware."
On a 486 with decent memory, it was hard to tell the difference in performance between 95 and 98. There's no mistaking the difference between XP and Vista on the same hardware, though. 1 gig of memory is fast for XP. On the same amount, Vista runs like a dog. Well, actually, Vista runs like a dog with any amount of memory.
As far as 98 to XP, Microsoft has an out there... 98 ran on the old DOS-based core, while XP has the much-more-capable but resource intensive NT core. So you're really comparing apples and oranges there. Vista has an NT based kernel, just like XP, so no excuse there.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The question in the title of this story is: "One Third of New PCs Downgraded To XP?" The answer is: This is a trick question. PCs are not being downgraded to Windows XP; they are being upgraded to Windows XP.
Let me explain. No, that'll take too long. Let me sum up. Windows XP is actually a very decent operating system, if you know how to install it. For that, there is a program called nLite. This is a program that allows you to insert your factory original Windows XP installation disc, choose basically all the various options that you would, on a normal installation, go through all the Control Panel windows, the registry, and maybe even some INI files, and then it makes you a new Windows XP installation disc that installs Windows with all those options set. So you can go ahead and switch all of Microsoft's defaults to their opposite. You tell it to optimize for best performance; get rid of those cartoonish looking blue and red windows in favor of the Windows 95 style; tell it to display extensions and hidden files; tell it to basically do everything backwards from the way Microsoft installs it normally. And once you do all those things, Windows installs in 30 minutes and runs like a meteor through cyberspace. A few additional utilities like CCleaner (set it to run on startup and check all the boxes) and a better editor than notepad (like UltraEdit-32, commercial software you have to pay for and it's worth every penny ten times over) and whatever other utilities you want... like FileZilla client and server for transferring files around your network (Windows SMB networking sucks -- that is unless you do it through Samba, in which case it works great), Wireshark for figuring out why Computer A can't "see" Computer B when you just transferred a file from Computer B to Computer A and that worked like a charm, those sorts of things. If you set it up using nLite to be a more businesslike OS and a less "let's make everything really easy so even the experts won't be able to move a file from one folder to another" then Windows XP is a wonderful operating system.
Windows Vista? I'll use it when it goes Open Source. (Hmmm, maybe I'd better be careful. Sarge was released; Apple did go Intel; and who knows, maybe Duke Nukem Forever will come out one of these days... You never know.)
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
4GB of RAM?? Overclocked? Are you serious? Why? What are you doing... decoding the genome of a new type of tapeworm you found up your ass? Seriously. Your desktop environment (if you need one) should not require that much RAM and processing power to run continuously and you only need that for high processing intense applications light rendering a friggin 3D movie in high def. I have several machines that get by on 2GB and less and running under 2GHZ. And they can kill most Windows apps on speed... sad to say.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Where I work XP is simply the current standard and even if Vista existed beyond the 2010 release date slated for Vienna we may never consider it. We get in a few hundred PCs annually at my site and it's a small site amongst several and that's not counting our retail outlet stores which number a few thousand.
It's not that we're thumbing our noses at Vista but rather that XP is what works for us and is stable.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I downgraded my Vista machine to XP. A critical pice of software I use was dog slow on vista. Dead-dog slow. By accident, i found out how to speed it up considerably - I unplugged the network cable.
No, this was not a network app. It's a CAD program. It does absolutely nothing over the network. Whassup with that? Unfortunately, I need the network, and after much fiddling and tweaking the network settings (I am qualified...) There was no change.
But, every time I disabled the network, my CAD program sped up. Until I wiped out the HD and installed XP. Now it's always fast as ever on my vista-class hardware.
VIsta gave me absolutely no benefit over XP. What's the reason for this OS?
--
http://www.rlt.com/14100 See our newest perpetual motion machine (as designed by Leonardo DaVinci)
"When Joe Sixpack asks his tech friend for advice on purchasing a shiny new laptop, chances are the geek may say something akin to "Avoid Vista like the plague."
How exactly do I avoid it when every laptop in town has it preinstalled?
No sig today...
I find Vista lacking in just too many ways. Until recently, I have never actually used it however. The facts before it is used speak well enough on their own. So throwing out any discussion about the user interface, enhanced effects, backward compatibility, increased stability or anything else that often results in subjective discussion, there still remains the two most important facts about Vista:
1. It requires more memory and processor resources to do the same job that XP does
2. It doesn't do more than XP does
Those are the reasons I have avoided Vista like the plague. Now the fact that in the office, the version of AutoCAD we use is known not to work particularly well with Vista is simply leverage over the fact that I see no business reason to change. Pursuant to my reluctance to change, I bought volume licenses for Vista... so that I maintained my right to downgrade to Windows XP. So now that machines are ONLY shipping with Vista, I am careful to be sure that XP drivers for devices are still available in any hardware selections I make and simply reload machines with XP.
My plan has started to pay off as I needed to buy a Lenovo laptop for one of my users. It came with Vista. I decided to test what should have been a PERFECTLY tweaked and tuned Vista installation. After all, it came with the hardware right? Pre-installed? One would think that it was done right. Perhaps I am over-estimating Lenovo, but I have never had a problem with the stock software load from Lenovo when it is running XP. In fact, those Lenovos [IBM Thinkpads] running XP have lasted years and have never been reloaded and are still running efficiently today. (That's saying a lot considering the typical pattern of "Windows Rot" I'm sure we're all familiar with.) So my expectations of quality and stability are based on my previous experience with Thinkpads and XP.
I powered up the Vista laptop and went about trying things out just in case my own prejudiced had really colored my view too badly. I'm really quick to admit when I'm wrong. That's why I use the name "erroneus" to begin with.
The machine suffered a very bad error that I can only describe. It wasn't a blue screen and it wasn't a lock-up exactly. It was something else... something weird. It was going through some sort of self-configuration stage after I agreed to not hold Lenovo or Microsoft liable for their products. I decided to move one of the Aero styled windows while the circle was circling so that I could entertain myself with the semi-transparent windows. The process was taking an odd amount of time in my opinion. Anyway, the window stopped moving and the circular cursor stopped rotating. The mouse cursor did move away from the window and in a particular rectangular region of the screen, the "busy" circle cursor would resume its rotation but there was no window there. In all other areas of the screen, it was the normal arrow. The hard drive was still chunking away so I let it go thinking it might catch up. It never did even after 45 minutes of doing "something." I tried to three-finger it, but no reaction could be observed. I waited longer... another 20 minutes or so. (I do other things too, so letting things ride for long periods of time is no big deal!) No changes could be observed. I forced the power off and powered back on. It resumed its setup process and continued on as if almost nothing were wrong. (It did acknowledge that something bad must have happened but at least it didn't try to blame me the way Windows9X used to do.)
Things seemed to go better this second go around but the hard drive NEVER stopped chunking and churning. I let it idle for hours and eventually over-night. It did eventually fall asleep only to wake up with a beep and go back to sleep again.
This machine has 1GB of RAM. It *should* be enough for Vista. It's not. And I haven't even loaded a single application on it. It's JUST the OS. What the hell? The damned swap file was growing and growing with no indication that it wo
Now if we slap a UI on it and make it asynchronous, we reach the nirvana of GUITAR.
String handling like you've never felt it before!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Try shutdown /a (run shutdown /? to see all options available) from command prompt. Not tried on vista, but at least on 2003, that's the command to abort a system shutdown.
On Linux, you need to know advanced terminal commands to do things like force the system to shut down.
On Windows, you need to know advanced terminal commands to stop the system from doing things to you...
Sounds like Linux is finally catching up by having Windows drop down to its level and heading the wrong way past!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
High on the list of Microsoft's greatest fears is virtualization.
I'm seeing *lots* of Intel Macs with one of Parallels/VirtualBox/VMWare. More than half, I'd estimate. Almost all with XP.
Virtualization, while it means an upgrade path for Microsoft, also means that people can upgrade to another OS. And, when they specify their next round of software, it's going to be software that runs natively on Mac or Linux.
Also, people are finding hardware without XP drivers (elsewhere in this thread). Virtualization can get around that. If Linux runs on it, xVM will.
Vista is bloated for many reasons, but the fact that its bulk and overhead make it a poor choice for virtual machines is surely considered a real positive around Redmond. That is, if they can make enough software *not* work in XP, people will stay in Windows, rather than Windows becoming a little legacy corner of their screen (Right now, I'm watching Olympic coverage in Silverlight in a corner of my Linux desktop).
I recently assembled a PC using an old Asus P4C800-E Deluxe with a 3.2GHz Prescott, Asus/ATI AH3650 (512MB, DirectX 10.1), 4GB OCZ platinum DDR RAM, and a 1TB Maxtor drive. I admit, this is not a state-of-the-art machine, but the video is excellent, and a 3.2GHz HT P4 with a megabyte of L2 cache is nothing to sneeze at.
Well, after a clean install of Vista with the Asus/ATI video drivers and SP1, the system is so low that I cannot use it. It reminds me of when I loaded W2K on an old Thinkpad with only 96MB of RAM (a real trick with no CD on the 233MHz Pentium X560). In fact, I'd say that the laptop was faster (until you loaded something like MS Word).
BTW, I loaded XP on the Asus first, and there were no delays for anything. Runs every app with no problem. With Vista, however, it is too slow to load an app to test.
You might think that the Vista machine had a virus or some other malware, but I have not yet put it onto a network. So, unless the Microsoft or Asus discs had a bug, then this machine was clean.
I am not disappointed by this, I am amazed. How can Microsoft live with these kind of results?
.
Walmart.com currently stocks 16 Vista laptops with 4 GB RAM. starting at $1000. You can get 64 Bit Vista Premium at this price point.
The 64 bit Vista Premium desktop at Walmart.com with 4 GB RAM also starts at $1000:
Quad Core CPU, 750 GB HDD, NVIDIA 9500 GS Graphics, HDTV Tuner and Combo Blu-Ray Player and DVD Burner.
HP Pavilion s3530f Slimline Desktop
Absolute rock bottom for the MS Vista Basic desktop at Walmart.com is the $329 Compaq Presario SR5505F w/ AMD Athlon X2 4200 Dual-Core Processor
--- and for the laptop the 1 GB Vista Basic Acer 15.4" Aspire 5315-2326 Laptop PC w/ Intel Celeron M Processor at $448.
The dual core laptop with 3 GB RAM starts at $800. Toshiba 15.4" Satellite L305-S5883 Laptop PC
It goes without saying that OEM Linux at Walmart.com doesn't come within ten light years of the specs of the MS Vista system at - any - price point.
then 66% of Vista PCs would be downgraded.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I love this idea, "have DOS3.3 installed." When I had a DOS computer you picked which DOS by sticking the appropriate floppy in the floppy drive when you turned the dang thing on. I didn't have a hard drive in a computer until Windows3.1 came along in my 486-33 with a 487 math co-processor. That thing was a speed demon. Most of the games I had were unplayable because things happened too quickly.
-- QED
Most of the games I had were unplayable because things happened too quickly.
That was due to common (but lazy) coding - if you remember from that era, most games had a "speed adjustment" bar, which was a simple data value tied to an idle loop (basically, it would add on a meaningless but semi-processor-intensive command, to be repeated X times, for each time the game's master thread looped).
A lot of third-party programs to "slow down" faster computers for older games worked the same way, just in the background.
Properly coded games, of course, actually use the system clock to adjust the timing of the main thread and should work on any system.
If you want to run those older games today, of course, you're lucky that DosBox actually lets you adjust how fast its emulation runs. I still enjoy OMF2097 from time to time on DosBox.
Just chipping in with what I'm having my company do (I'm the Director of IT). We have no Vista machines on our network, we don't support them at home (even for executives), and we are downgrading all new purchases through Dell to XP Pro. We have evaluated Vista extensively, will not be implementing it at all; instead, we'll continue to downgrade.
We have begun implementing some Macs at the company, including one running VMWare Fusion and a copy of Win XP inside to handle a specific catalog application. While not perfect either, the Macs play nicer than Vista, and running XP in a VM is a real pleasure on a loaded Mac Pro.
Our biggest issues with Vista are the same ones than many people have mentioned over and over in here. Since MS is not even owning up to the problems, we're taking matters in our own hands.
If Windows 7 is little more than a modularized Vista, the only thing that may save it is hardware speed and the ability to carve out the exact "Windows" overhead we need to function.
And if we slice it up on a sandwich with yogurt and garlic, we've got GUITAR GYRO!!! Yum!!
(ducks out the back exit)
Properly coded games, of course, actually use the system clock to adjust the timing of the main thread and should work on any system.
That's sloppily fixed games.
Properly coded games, actually synchronize to the display refresh rate. Which not only gives a fixed speed, but also give a smooth animation (the 60Hz display refresh has a finer grain than the 18.2Hz system clock, and synching to display avoid tearing and other artefacts).
Also, synchronizing the refresh rate was a requirement for very old hardware to avoid displaying garbage (single channel memory, couldn't be accessed by the DAC and the system at the same time). That's why some archaeologically-old games still run well on more recent PCs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's a very optimistic appraisal. The only problem is that Windows98 was not as forcibly removed from the users who needed it as is the case with XP. Vista is being pushed so hard and XP hindered, it makes me wonder what sort of existing good will Microsoft is losing in this practice. Or was it intentional in order to force me to buy Vista licenses with downgrade rights so that their numbers are higher?
And another thing: Will the next one after Vista (assuming we can continue to survive by with XP) be more frugal with memory or will we have to trash perfectly useful and powerful machines?
I don't know if anyone has noticed it or not, but we have reached something of a plateau where adding memory no longer speeds a machine up... it just gives a machine more room to work.
When comparing DOS 3.3-4.x-5.0 to Win98-WinME-WinXP and WinXP-Vista-????, you're really comparing Oranges to weird genetically modified fruit that doesn't exist yet.