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.'"
Blackmail is such an ugly word...
I prefer "extortion." The "X" makes it sound cool
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."
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?
> 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".
I don't get it either. Why anyone in the consumer space would want to use XP over Vista is beyond me at this point.
At this point I have been using Vista for over a year. Anytime I have to go back and use XP it feels like an out-dated system. For one, the lack of an integrated desktop search client is a huge productivity loss. It's like using a Mac without Spotlight, who really wants to do that anymore?
Secondly, desktop composition in Vista also vastly improves the windows switcher by providing live previews of the windows instead of undescriptive application icons.
Overall I find Vista to be a huge step forward in usability over XP.
I play mostly old games: GTA2, Diablo II, Sim City 2000, Age of Empires II... They're the only reason I kept Windows installed. Vista breaks most of them. I have better support from WINE.
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.
When Vista was first release, I had a client that used an industry specific billing/accounting/inventory management system for the health care industry. Granted I had been working with them for about 6 months and the software vendor warned them "WILL NOT WORK IN VISTA". I kept pressuring them to buy their workstations before the switch over. They wanted to go through Dell, that was the hardware vendor the software company recommended and why rock the boat, especially since they have to deal with said vendor long term.
At any rate, I warned them that on Jan 31st they wouldn't be able to buy PC's with XP loaded from Dell. Honestly, I think they thought I was lying or making it up. This was a small business less than 10 employees who were waiting for a big public aid check to come in. (80% of their business is public aid, and they get paid it's always a matter of when). I even told them in December to put the workstation purchases on the company credit card or go to the bank and get a 180 day short term note, but just buy the workstations before the switch over.
I finished up the disaster recovery plan and all the work I had been hired for about the middle of Jan. I told them again to buy the workstations then. But long story short, I got a phone call in March saying, "We can't buy XP from DELL, so we had to buy vista and the software won't work". I was working on another project 500 miles away and answered bluntly in six words: "Don't say I didn't warn you."
The software vendor flew down some engineers and the company got the luxury of spending $16k to be the beta testers for their Vista version of the software. Apparently it was July before they had all the kinks worked out.
I heard this story repeated several times with various in house or specialty applications in the early days. Especially in small businesses where suddenly, on of their cheap office PC's broke and they had to run out and buy a replacement, and all they could find was machines with Vista that couldn't run their software. It wasn't until the summer that MS allowed the option to pre-install XP again on machines.
Today, it's not that bad, but at launch, there were some problems.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
They charge more for XP Pro, so it must be more valuable than Vista. I'll go with that instead.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... there, I said it!
I was forced to buy a new computer this summer in a hurry, and all I could get was Vista SP1. Maybe it's just that SP1 took care of the big issues that you hear about, I don't know. But it works just fine, quite responsive, stable as hell, and I haven't had a single problem with it. I turned off all the Aero crap because I just didn't care for it, not because it was a performance issue.
Mostly I'm in Ubuntu Intrepid anyway, but Vista is just the new Windows as far as I can tell - no worse than any of 'em. When I hear some of the stuff people say about Vista, I wonder what they're talking about, because it doesn't match my experience at all.
that 1GB is a myth. It's just precaching all sorts of things in case you use them so that they become available faster. Should your computer actually need to use the ram for something, Vista will dump out the precached parts to allow it.
-]Phreak Out[-
Windows logo("Super" key)+r launches the run dialog, then type the first few letters of a command - for example 'cmd', 'notepad', or 'http://$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)
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'm tired of the "people are stupid" argument.
Become an educator.
Just callin' it like I see it.
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.
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.