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Vista To XP Upgrade Triples In Price, Now $150
ozmanjusri writes "Dell has tripled the charge to upgrade Vista PCs to XP. Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system. Rob Enderle says the downgrade fees could potentially be disastrous for Microsoft: 'The fix for this should be to focus like lasers on demand generation for Vista but instead Microsoft is focusing aggressively on financial penalties," says Enderle. 'Forcing customers to go someplace they don't want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.'"
I don't know. It's not red for me. But then again I'm logged in with the "no icon" and "Slashdot Classic Discussion System" options, which makes everything seem to work 10x faster than the new defaults.
I used to use the "low-bandwidth" option too, before I realised that also cut out the polls.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Seems like companies will take advantage of the consumer at every chance they get. Obviously your laptop should cost LESS with Windows XP pre-installed as it is a dated product. Vista does have a few valuable features that I believe give it superiority over XP. Fast user switching in Domain environments is a big plus. Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol with their new VPN Client would be a huge bonus to corporate VPN users. However, these are the only two nice things I have to say about Vista, and honestly their is no reason these features couldn't have been integrated into Windows XP. While these features are beneficial to corporate environments, Vista is hardly a candidate for a corporate workstation. Regardless if you have been running Vista without problems, slap it on enough workstations and laptops, and you will begin to see the issues trying to support it. I use Ubuntu, although I was recently employed with a small company that wanted to keep up to date on Windows operation systems so I found myself supporting a number of Vista users. It was definitely one of the busiest jobs I've ever had.
... there, I said it!
I was forced to buy a new computer this summer in a hurry, and all I could get was Vista SP1. Maybe it's just that SP1 took care of the big issues that you hear about, I don't know. But it works just fine, quite responsive, stable as hell, and I haven't had a single problem with it. I turned off all the Aero crap because I just didn't care for it, not because it was a performance issue.
Mostly I'm in Ubuntu Intrepid anyway, but Vista is just the new Windows as far as I can tell - no worse than any of 'em. When I hear some of the stuff people say about Vista, I wonder what they're talking about, because it doesn't match my experience at all.
that 1GB is a myth. It's just precaching all sorts of things in case you use them so that they become available faster. Should your computer actually need to use the ram for something, Vista will dump out the precached parts to allow it.
-]Phreak Out[-
That's why Ubuntu is growing in popularity... it's about as efficient as XP while still including all of the useful features of Vista, like integrated search and composited desktop. Boots into about 200-300MB RAM used, which is 2-3x smaller than Vista, leaving room to virtualise Windows XP for your legacy applications.
Sam ty sig.
Launching applications is easier and faster:
(1) press ctrl+esc to bring up start menu
(2) press N (first letter of "notepad"
(3) press O
(4) press Enter (autocompletion)
Five keystrokes, about 500ms, and way faster than navigating to it with the mouse. And similarly for launching most of the apps I use.
To navigate to a network share that I used recently
(1) ctrl+esc
(2) \ (first character of "\\herbert")
(3) \
(4) h
(5) down cursor key into the auto-completion list
(6) Enter
7 keystrokes, about 800ms.
What functionality is easier to find? -- any installed application! e.g. I know that Windows Backup is installed somewhere, but I don't know where, and I can't remember if it's called "Windows Backup" or just "Backup" or "System Backup".
(1) ctrl+esc
(2) b
(3) a (this is enough for the autocomplete list to populate)
(4) enter (to launch it)
What else is easier? Well, I judge what time to start the commute home by looking at traffic maps. On XP it involved clicking on my web-browser launch icon, clicking on the favourites menu, navigating to the bookmark that has the stuff, clicking on it, waiting 15 seconds for the page to load.
On Vista, a snippet of that webpage is sitting on my desktop in the form of a Vista Gadget. Total time required to judge traffic conditions: 300ms, the time it takes me to look at that corner of the screen and digest it.
Previous poster(s) hit the nail on the head... very little incremental cost, if any, to put XP images on their machines, vs. Vista unless MS' bulk price for XP licenses has gone up. I'm surprised that a handful of people have defended Vista as performing reasonably well, and stably. I fix and set up PCs for home users, and I have yet to see a Vista machine, whether bargain basement warehouse club cheapy, or high-end gaming rig, that didn't pause at odd, arbitrary moments during simple operations such as opening up a folder, or populating the control apps in the Control Panel. The performance issues I described are after I do a thorough performance tuning - putting it in Classic Mode, removing bloatware, using MSconfig to disable all startup items other than the security package, and disabling unncesessary services. I've done perhaps a hundred of my own vista ----> XP "downgrades" (Had customer buy an XP CD) and they've gone rather smoothly, resulting in far better performance. The thing I feared since the day after the official launch (the day I did my first downgrade), are manufacturers that are making OEM devices that go into system boards, such as sound, networking, etc without publishing XP drivers. So far, not so much, with the glaring exception of a Dell Studio laptop with a Broadcom wireless device for which I could only get Vista drivers.
Funny it never worked for me. Probably because I have non-english Vista. It seems to me that Vista expects me to type the "friendly name" of the app. So typing "c" or "cm" does not offer "cmd". I always have to type in all of "eventvwr", "regedit", "notepad", "write", "explorer" - the programs I use most. Finding the program by typing the executable name never works. Annoying as hell.
Another pet peeve is that explorer is lying about file and directory names. Some clever brain in MS thinks that showing "user friendly" localized name of c:\users is a good idea. Removing hidden Desktop.ini helps. Try finding that in Help.
Another thing - copying from network to \program files is a no-no as long as UAC is enabled. I'm a developer so I want to copy my own executables on test system. Doesn't matter what are the permissions, whether I'm Administrator or not, whether I copy from network to Vista or to Vista from network ...
Windows logo("Super" key)+r launches the run dialog, then type the first few letters of a command - for example 'cmd', 'notepad', or 'http://$SITE' and autocomplete from there. This has been the case for at least since Windows 98, and even if there is no autocomplete on the OS the commands aren't all that hard to type.
:D.
About 100-200ms depending on caffeine consumption minus typos. Another area where Vista is reinventing the wheel, badly. Can be made fun of like: "reinventing the wheel as a square", or "reinventing the 'wheel'" (root's group in Unix, UAC/security joke)
Or you could use Launchy.
(1) alt/win+space
(2) n (selects notepad)
(3) enter
Bookmark the network share, then
(1) alt/win+space
(2) first letter or two of bookmark name
(3) enter
windows backup
(1) alt/win+space
(2) b, maybe a
(3) enter
And it works in windows XP, Vista, and Linux(!).
Question everything
Yeah, it runs fine on my old machine to, the dual cpu quad core with 8gb ram... i don't see why everyone if complaining. Oh yeah, and I am a fucking moron.
I wondered about the legality of using a mouse as a component to buy an OEM operating system, so I did some research.
Turns out prior to August 2005, you could buy a copy of an OEM operating system with an "essential, non-peripheral component" - so a mouse would not qualify, but an IEC power cable would.
The changed rules renamed the licenses "system builder" and made them available to anyone building their own PC - including end users.
Incorrect. A mouse did qualify. I called Microsoft about selling OEM OS's with mice pre-2005, and they OK'd it. In fact, re-read the article you linked.
It was, specifically, under essential component. The agreement at MS at the time was that since the system requirements included a mouse, it was an essential component.
This is straight from Microsoft, to me, pre-2005.