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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.
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.
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.
Agreed. Our office has ordered around 120 PCs in the past few months, all with XP preloaded. We wipe and reimage them before the end users see them, but the gesture is appreciated.
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...)
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....
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.
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.
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?
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http://www.rlt.com/14100 See our newest perpetual motion machine (as designed by Leonardo DaVinci)
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).