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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.'"
Blackmail is such an ugly word...
I prefer "extortion." The "X" makes it sound cool
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.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Well, since it's an upgrade, it's only fair that people should pay more, right?
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."
> Somebody had to post it
No.
XP is three times more valuable than Vista.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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
I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! - the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved $HATED user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint! It'll leave $LAST_VERSION utterly in the shade.
The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray(tm) of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.
A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day - the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets - in the shade.
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. We have to charge them more for $PREVIOUS_VERSION, to get them to understand just how cool $NEXT_VERSION will be.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
The biggest inconvenience is having to show up at a dell depot so the can bend you over a desk.
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.
This won't really apply to home users but for corporate and office users they will not pay $150 to downgrade to XP when they can use the restore WinXP SP3 CD that came with the prior PCs. Long as the PCs have a license sticker on the machine such as Vista or higher they have the right to downgrade for free.
Dell is just milking everybody much as they can and it's wrong. Makes me wonder if this is even legal?
Color me mildly shocked that Enderle, at least in TFS, accurately described the situation.
Does Microsoft charge them more for XP? (Which would be illogical for older software).
Surely they don't prtend that it costs more to dump one image to a drive rather than another?
Costs more because of diver support? Nope, Dell don't write the drivers...
So, I'm confused as to how they can justify this.
Mind you, not surprising from a company that charges the same for a PC with Linux as it does for Vista....
is Rob Enderle right about something?
Do you have ESP?
This is something that can only happen when there is a monopoly involved. If there were a real and competitive environment, a vendor would not be able to do this to their customers without them choosing the competition.
It is so bad, that they aren't choosing competition, they are choosing to keep their previous product. Its pathetic.
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.
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
The aspire one with 1G ram and 160G hard-drive (same hardware), is available both with windows xp and linux, the linux one costs 50EURless than the windows one.
... 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.
The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way to recover sunk costs expended to try to obtain the bait.
Microsoft can spray all the marketing turd polish they want on Vista but it will still stink.
Vista, with good drivers, is JUST AS GOOD AS XP.
Is it different, in a way that some are scared by? Sure. If you use XP drivers, is it worse? Yep. But Windows Vista isn't any worse than Windows XP, and if you're getting a new PC you might as well get the new OS as well.
Any turd-i-ness that Vista retains is strictly due to it being Windows.
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.
Any turd-i-ness that Vista retains is strictly due to it being Windows.
I don't believe a Windows that runs like a dog even if you blow $1,000 on new hardware and that has been designed to allow Microsoft to de-escalate your privileges when it pleases them (turn on full DRM or apply other, stealth "updates") describes XP nearly as well as it describes Vista.
Ballmer should be on his hands and knees begging Allchin to come back. Even promise him a chair on the board, if he can find one.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Anecdotal story: I helped my brother in-law install an XP partition on his laptop, since Vista was crashing (probably hardware/driver issues on a cheap HP laptop).
His comment: "Wow, it's faster and my old games work on it!"
I'd say that unless some magic new feature (which I've yet to see) balances out the slowness and incompatibility, Vista is arguably worse.
Can you name a feature that makes Vista better than XP in a way that can't be tweaked with a registry key or some free add-on? If you say aero then I won't argue, but most sane people use their OS to run other programs, not just a shiny UI...
If MS wants me to upgrade to Vista, I'll do it, once they make it an operating system suitable for general purpose computation.
That means dumping the DRM. I don't want to "take advantage" of any "premium content" on my computer in any event. If I want to, there are other ways to ensure a "premium experience" that I can do myself. I' don't mind "activation" and all that BS, but once the OS is licensed, butt out.
Bottom line: I don't trust an OS that doesn't trust me.
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.
If just as good you mean more resource intensive for roughly the same functionality then yeah you are right. Vista is an unneccesary and overpriced extension of the functionality found in XP. There is almost NOTHING that will run on Vista that wont run on XP. Even the supposed DX10 Vista only games were easily patched to run on XP. Im sure Vista runs fine now, but it doesnt offer me anythign functionality wise to risk the driver and hardware compatibility, not to mention the change hardware-reactivate BS.
Good-bye
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.
Well, for me the shiny UI is actually useful when I'm trying to find one of about 15 or 20 windows I have open at any given time. All the little windows thumbnails everywhere are dead useful. Aside from that I particularly enjoy the built in incremental backup functionality that is built into ultimate and having search/indexing functionality that actually works and is fast(xp's search never seemed to find anything). Sure, its not the leap that Microsoft promised, some things improved, some things got a little worse, and some things are just different. But in general more things got better than got worse. Thats the way software usually is.
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.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
Yeah ok. How are those cheese triangles coming?
Aack! s/"the business drivers will again be that strong."/the business drivers will never again be that strong/.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
But Vista is pretty, and then it crashes...
How much was the Mojave upgrade? It's spoken so highly of on TV by real experts. Yes sir, it sounds like MS really hit the mark with that one.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
"'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've heard this argument before but it just doesn't make sense. Here's why:
I am a computer user that uses windows. I can buy a machine with windows, a good one, for $500 or less. But its got, vista, I don't like vista. So what do most slashdotters think will happen next?
1) abandon windows and buy a mac that costs twice as much as a windows pc
2) abandon windows and buy a cheaper pc running linux
3) user buys vista machine for $500
I would say a normal rational shopper would go with number 3.
Here's why 1 wouldn't be an option.
It is irrational to pay twice as much for a computer that does basically the same thing and has a much different interface.
Here's why 2 wouldn't be an option.
The shopper is less likely to find a computer running linux for sale in a store or online, if they weren't specifically shopping for a linux pc. In addition, if they knew anything about linux they would realize it can't run word, internet explorer, itunes or most of the other programs they want without a high level of expertise.
Here's why 3 would be the choice:
Its available. Vista is easier to transition to if you are already familiar with windows xp. The price is cheaper than mac. You can run most of your programs you want on it.
Not this time - you're dealing with the endlessly witty hivemind of Slashdot.
Calling Vista a downgrade the first time was such a hoot that they can't resist repeating it once a day until I feel like my eyes are actually vomiting from reading it.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
The magic new feature is support.
Windows 98 did die out because it was broken, there were plenty of after market software solutions that could more then make up for any of 98's downfalls. But then companies like Avira and Mozilla go to Microsoft to get support insight and help integrating their products into Vista and all the sudden the coincidence of ending the life of the windows 98 support for a lot of the products. They same happened with windows 2000 which technically should be able to run almost everything XP could. SO your right in that XP might not be missing anything. It won't become functionally obsolete, it will just get left behind in some sort of unconcerned move every software vendor will make to newer MS products.
In other words, there will come a time when you need something and you will end up having to upgrade to get it or the free and open source products like Mozilla will just ignore the platform and no one with the skill will pick it up.
yeah, but, with respect, you can tweak vista in about 5 minutes (google it) and you'll get all that performance back (and in fact, vista is really quite KDE like in a lot of ways). it's not hard.
the main act of Supreme Retardation by microsfot was in selecting the default settings that vista uses. it seems maximized to piss people off. i agree you shouldn't have to tweak them out of the box. (XP also requires tweaking to get huge improvements, though not as drastic).
also, don't be mislead by vista's memory use. it's doing much smarted things with memory than XP does and does not signify sloth. google "superfetch".
I often run on a similarly spec'd machine to yours and it's absolutely fine, and benchmarks the electro-magnetic simulation software I use in the same time as XP on the machine.
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
A 64-Bit OS that can address my 8GB of RAM and has drivers supplied for it by almost every company? I dunno, that's why I put vista-64 on my latest Desktop. I use it mostly to run office and VM-workstation with windows server products as a testing environment (and several flavors of linux).
With a 9800GT, a Phenom 9650, and 2 SATA disks with 8GB of ram, it seems to run fine to me.
(My laptop runs Linux, my macbook runs OSX)
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
...Can you name a feature that makes Vista better than XP....
That question might be re-stated: Can you name a feature that makes Vista better than Mac OSX?
I still have an iBook G4 that came with OSX.3 originally and was upgraded later to 768M of RAM. Since I had bought a family license of OSX.5 (leopard) for our other Macs, I decided to upgrade the G4. It runs faster and better now than when it was new. This is also the case with our original Mac mini, which is now used for music and video, driving our 47 inch LCD television. Also, the same scanner and printer drivers that worked with OSX.3 work just the same with OSX.5, which is not the case with old XP drivers working on VISTA.
Any time you upgrade old hardware with a newer version of Windows, performance drops significantly. The only way you can get performance back up, is to throw or give away the old hardware and buy a new computer. When you buy a decent name brand (not the cheapest junk available) new computer with VISTA, its performance is about the same or slightly better than the old one with XP. The biggest reason why Microsoft does this, is because they make most of their money not from user upgrades of their OS, but from the manufacturers of new computers. They force the users to buy new hardware, so that they can run improved software. So, if forced to buy a new computer anyway, to run VISTA, why not get a Mac and be done with malware infested Windows forever? It seems that some of the smarter people out there are coming to a very logical conclusion. This is why, even in a recession, the more expensive Macs are still selling well.
All theory is gray
Ten years, here, and neither have I. Of course, I just never bother to post stuff that I don't want linked to my UID.
Put identity in the browser.
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...?
The main problem with people who want to do a manual XP install on a new PC is not being prepared spec-wise before doing it. They think they can just buy any old off the shelf system and boot from an old XP disc they had from years ago and that's not the case. The first issue is SATA drives. XP doesn't natively support SATA drives from the install CD. On most Dells you can bypass this by putting the controller into compatability mode in the bios but once set if you try to revert back to native mode it will bluescreen at boot. If you know the exact SATA controller, you can slipstream the drivers into the install CD, but that requires some expertise to do. Second, peripheral drivers. It is getting harder to get drivers for lots of things (especially laptops) for XP. If a system came with Vista-64, the manufacturer may not even have have 32 bit Vista drivers. If I can get ahold of a user before they make their purchase. I'll try to tell them to buy a straight Intel system. Intel processor and chipset. For those systems the drivers are typically available from Intel or as an alternate Dell who has XP driver support for all of their Optiplex systems (which you can usually reuse the drivers for another Intel system). Lastly is the audio. New systems use the new Microsoft HD Audio bus, which is available as a hotfix, but onboard audio chipset makers like Sigmatel, Conexant, Analog Devices don't typically host audio drivers on their site, and if you load similar drivers from another manufacturer, you may find that some ports on the computer don't function or the mixer may be messed up. So I can understand Dell starting to charge more since they have to grease the wheel with the hardware manufacturers to get driver support.
An important point not really mentioned much is that, from what I can see, this is an increase in the amount that Dell charges to do it FOR you. The right to downgrade still comes with an Ultimate or Business license...you just have to provide your own install media and contact Microsoft's activation hotline to get an install key.
At least, that how it was a few weeks back...MS tends to change licensing rules a lot...