Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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"
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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."
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.
> Being the consumer sheeple they are, they're going to go with what hits their wallet the least
The Pirate Bay
I don't think Vista has a big stability problem, but it really is a resource hog. On my box, Vista eats up 1GB of RAM doing absolutely nothing, even with Areo turned off and all effects etc disabled. Compared to this, I can run on the same Box, Ubuntu 8.10 + Windows XP (inside Virtual Box) under 750MB, really no kidding. And that too with Compiz and every thing. Under Ubuntu I can run quite a lot of applications simultaneously without loading the box too much, while Vista is brought down on its knees even when copying big files around.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Last year, I bought a medium level $800 Acer desktop for my aunt/uncle. I was tired of wrestling with their XP Home 500 mhz celeron. It wasn't just the slow speed, but the lack of UAC that made basic security with these two a nightmare. They wouldn't take Ubuntu because they absolutely had to have Quickbooks for the 3 invoices they wrote on it a year (I'm not joking, it's what they knew and didn't want alternatives to).
I will admit, with UAC, and putting them on non-administrative (just standard) accounts with Firefox on, Vista is much nicer than XP in this direction.
But when I got the computer, in addition to Acer's stupid and ultimately useless bloatware sucking up all the speed, Microsoft's Aero was set for maximum bling on integrated graphics. It took the computer minutes to start up. The entire time, out of the box, it sounded like it was grinding (and it was grinding to a halt with the hourglass every few minutes) as it was constantly swapping even with 2GB ram.
I stopped all that with over 15 tedious uninstalls of various components of Acer's pre-installed bloatware (why oh why can't MS have a synaptic type installer/uninstaller with multiple installs/uninstalls at once?) and stopping several services and setting all of the visual effects to minimize asides a few font/other smoothing settings. The machine felt several times faster.
But most of that is beyond the regular user. This computer, brand new, felt like a dog out of the box. Why Acer does this is beyond me, it can't look good for them. But more than that, why Microsoft lets them, will be the death of them one day. This is Apple's big win - their computers just work out of the box. And feel new and fast.
While the bloatware is not new, it's gets worse every reiteration. What is new is MS's own default settings are dragging the systems down. Not even uninstalls make it better. People have to muck with the systems.
I suppose that is part of the resistance to Vista. Security wise, and some other things (like icon/thumbnail browsing and editing - rotation) is much nicer. I like not seeing .db thumbnail files in every directory. Big win there. But the experience out of the box is abysmal.
Can you quantify that? What tasks are quicker to perform? What functionality is easier to find?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I am erotic. You are kinky. They are perverts.
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
And you just happened to hit the problem with pre installed Linux. since Linux will run on less RAM and CPU than a MSFT OS many companies use the cheapest CPU and least amount of RAM and storage space they can get away with and put Linux on it to make an "ultra value" cheapie box out of it. Just look at the specs on those gOS machines Walmart was selling last year. So if you want specs out of the box that don't suck you pretty much HAVE to buy the Windows version, which MSFT will get paid for and will count as a sale even if you trash it. It sucks for those that just want a Linux PC, but I just don't see this trend ending anytime soon.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.