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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.'"
Most people believe that Windows is synonymous with computers. Being the consumer sheeple they are, they're going to go with what hits their wallet the least—especially in a depressed economy.
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It's so huge and its hold is so strong that even the giants like Microsoft, trying their hardest to destroy it, can't succeed.
Honestly, I don't know what all the resistance to Vista is all about. I've been using it everyday for the past 18 months plus, and I've never had a problem with it, and that's on what was a relatively low-end machine I bought three years ago. All my hardware works fine, it never crashes, and it's easy to use. It doesn't seem at all slow to me, either. And, yes, I also use Linux as my main computer at work. I just prefer Vista for its ease-of-use when I come home.
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Merry Christmas and a bottle of rum! But seriously, combined with economic downturn, more and more people will just pirate it.
How do they rationalize it to the consumer, I'm kind of curious, given that they phrase it as a "downgrade"
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I can't wait for the Apple ads to make fun of this. People are willing to pay extra to avoid Windows Vista.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
> Somebody had to post it
No.
One reason people say Linux has a hard time gaining ground is because it's free so people think it's shit so it has to be given away.
That's partially true. People do believe the cost of something is related to it's value. Well now MS is implying that XP is better because it costs much more to have it. The sad thing is they're probably right in that it is better.
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We protect. Our allies enforce. Our enemies oppress.
Government appropriates. Telecoms lobby. WiFi users steal.
It all depends on your point of view.
They charge more for XP Pro, so it must be more valuable than Vista. I'll go with that instead.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I've personally never liked the idea of replacing a 7-year-old machine only to get the exact same (or worse) performance.
Is there really any reason to upgrade to Vista (aside from the "we're forcing you to upgrade through lack of support" nonsense)? Upgrading to XP got most (home) users onto the NT codebase, but what does upgrading to Vista really give to end users? That pretty GUI which requires 2GB ram and 3d hardware to run smoothly? Tch. I'll pass, thanks.
I bought my wife a computer for Christmas for around 300 - no monitor.
She asked that I install Linux on it for her.
She wasn't home when I set it up so I decided to give vista a whirl thinking that surely it isn't as resource intensive as everyone here makes it out to be.
This was not a high end system, but a definite upgrade from her old computer. It was a 2.1GHz 64 bit Dual Core Processor with 2 gig of ram.
It was worse than I could have imagined. The only thing that was fast was the boot time but afterward everything was almost non-responsive and did not get much better after all the drivers were installed.
I ended up installing 64 bit Debian Sid withe KDE 4 from experimental.
KDE 4 is blew Vista out of the water in terms of speed. I can't compare much of the features because Vista took so damn long to do anything I finally gave up.
I've personally never liked the idea of replacing a 7-year-old machine only to get the exact same (or worse) performance.
Amen. I believe this is a matter of cultural momentum. During the early days of PC adoption, you could easily forecast that hardware would become faster, memory would become plentiful, and (here's the important bit) that people would be hungry for improvement. This latter point was a crucial business driver, because there was so much unrealised potential in the PC during the early era. Can you actually write an entire book using a PC for example? You can now, but it wasn't so easy then.
When you look at today's performance and price curves, the forecasts have diverged a bit, and the business drivers will again be that strong. You can't keep adding multipliers to the resources an OS needs, because hardware capability isn't increasing logarithmically any more. And more to the point, the hunger isn't there any more. Superb capability has become a commodity, so there is little perceived need to fund improvements.
The issue with Microsoft is that -- largely due to their size -- they have been working on the assumption that people will always hunger for more, when in fact those needs have largely been met by now. If they really want to remain profitable, they should simply stop innovating, cut their team down to where their momentum is less than that of continental drift, and print copies of XP Pro to people who will still continue to insist on Windows for new computers. The rest of us would be grateful to them if they did.
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Unless you do real work with it.
Vista Test by me.
Client DEMANDED Vista. we gave it to him.
Accounting software stopped working. Upgraded to a tune of $4500.00 to make it work.
Software for the CNC machines stopped working. (reporting and program generation) no solution. Must dual boot to XP or VMWARE to XP.
Software for CAD. Stopped working (Autocad Dongle Vista Issue.) Upgrade to fix the issue $8900.00
Vista COST that company well over $20,000.00 and give them a hit on productivity.
My Personal test... video editign station. New Vista system: Editing software fails or errors a LOT. under XP on the SAME HARDWARE it has no failures.
Vendor has no workable solution other than "we are working on that"
Vista take a working computer and makes it not work for it's job.
Now, I can switch from industry standard pro video editing software to one of the crappy toys that works under vista. but then the HDMI capture card and the other analog capture cards fail to operate as they DONT HAVE VISTA DRIVERS.
Vista is great for a home PC that is not used for anything. Vista sucks when you make money on the Computer and HAVE TO have the system work no matter what.
Hence almost EVERY corporation has no plants to upgrade to Vista. Even microsoft Puppets like Comcast are not doing it.
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What's also dreadful about it is that it's an excuse for your inability to get your ideas over. You convince yourself that it's not that your ideas are wrong, or that your arguments are weak, or that your communication skills aren't up to the job. No, it's because people are sheeple, so it's not your fault.
Uhm... Wasn't the reason people hate linux that they have to google around for fixes for things that should work out of the box, and wasn't the great part of Windows that every end user can just use the computer without having to tweak it...?