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MS Reportedly Adds 6 Months of Vista Downgrade
LiteralKa sends in a poorly sourced Reg story claiming that Microsoft has granted OEMs six more months to sell PCs using Windows Vista with the support to downgrade to Windows XP. OEMs can now offer such arrangements until July 31, 2009 — the previous deadline was January 31, 2009. The article claims as source "a Reg reader" without further details. Neither Microsoft nor any OEM has confirmed the rumor, and only a few scattered bloggers have picked it up.
And this crap about it being a resource hog is BS. If you're running all the bells and whistles, I got news for you folks, of course it's going to be a comparative pig - geeze. Turn off Aero if you got a low end machine or buy the machine with Home instead of Ultimate - god!
While I disagree with the general Vista bashing, it is not difficult to confirm that Vista is a lot slower than XP. I've got both installed in VirtualBox. XP boots in 10-15 seconds, Vista in 1-1.5 minutes. That's the time to get to the desktop; responsiveness comes 5 seconds later for XP and 1 minute later for Vista. Audio stutters on Vista but not on XP. Same with video. Etc.
I like most of the changes in Vista. From big things like UAC to small ones like the naming of C:\Users. But one can't deny it's a damn heavy OS.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Then I guess all those benchmarks out there must be wrong. It's all a conspiracy to bury Microsoft's newest product. Yeah... that must be it.
And my first hand experience with Vista... also part of this conspiracy. My mother has a computer that was "built for Vista" (which, by the way, MS has admitted was a "marketing overstatement", ie. LIE). It's slow. It crashes ALOT. We've upgraded drivers. We've done a clean install. We took the necessary updates. It still crashes. It's still slow. It's still a load of crap.
My high-end system costs $4k. It has everything that anyone could want in a system. It can do ray tracing lightning fast but apparently can't load Vista in under 15 minutes, even after spending hours removing all the "sparkle" that is the new UI.
Your experience appears to be derived from a single desktop. I have used multiple desktops, laptops, and notebooks. I have also done research and generally kept up on the happenings in Vista in case there was some mystical transformation from trash-heap to XP-upgrade. I have yet to see it.
I'm glad it works for you, but, you are a minority of a minority and are in no way a benchmark for all Vista installs.