Posted on 04/12/2007 8:20:09 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Computer makers have been told they'll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite consumer resistance to Vista and its compatibility problems.
By early 2008, Microsoft's contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines. "The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January," said Frank Luburic, senior ThinkPad product manager for Lenovo. "At that point, they'll have no choice."
Despite Microsoft's relentless promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the finicky SOHO market.
In a recent post on its Direct2Dell blog, Dell reaffirmed to concerned customers that it wasn't about to force small business users -- who typically purchase PCs piecemeal, rather than in large enterprise-style orders -- to shift to Vista, which has experienced a less-than-stellar reaction from many buyers because of driver issues and moderately beefy hardware requirements.
"Dell recognizes the needs of small business customers and understands that more time is needed to transition to a new operating system," the post read in part. "The plan is to continue offering Windows XP on select Dimension and Inspiron systems until later this [northern] summer."
"From a local perspective, the post was a reminder more than an announcement," Dell ANZ corporate communications manager Paul McKeon told APC.
"This was something we'd always planned during the transition phase since businesses will have different time frames to adopt the new OS. If you're a consumer, you're unlikely to be managing more than say 2.4 OS images at home, so it's less of an issue"
There's general agreement amongst PC resellers that Vista has provided a minor boost to PC sales, but hasn't produced blockbuster numbers. A similar story applies in the retail space. Figures from marketing consultancy GfK suggest that after an initial sales surge, around 1500 copies of Vista are now being sold through Australian retailers each week, according to a recent report in the AFR.
While Dell's post suggested it wouldn't be promoting Vista systems to the home market, manufacturers still have the option of selling XP-based systems for consumers this year.
I have already looked at Linux. It pretty much sux unless you are a programmer. The latest distro to take the windoz malcontents( me), was Ubuntu. Installs great! Then I put a music CD in. Needs a codec downloaded from Timbuktu. Put in a DVD. Won't play without a codec downloaded from somewhere else. Practically everything requires you to Re compile the Kernel. I don't savy that. If you want to run Firefox and read e mail and nothing else. Linux will do the trick. Anything else seems to throw a wrench in the works.
I consider myself an average computer user. I started with DOS 3.1 on a 286 in 1984. I don't have any particular love for MS. In fact, for years now, I've been looking at alternatives. The Linux people keep touting how good it is, but I don't see it. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is a hassle. Why, oh why, can't you just double click on an executable file and it do what it's supposed to do? I don't want to mount anything, or compile anything, or search newsgroups for 3rd party anything. If I'm too dumb to learn it, then about 98% of the known world is too dumb to operate Linux. The best distro I've personally seen so far is Xandros. I have a dual boot machine with that on it. To me, it just a little better than useless. I'm trying to learn the "Linux lingo" but it basically reads e mail and surfs the web. It will play music and DVD's with what's on the disk, but I just don't get how it is so much better than MS. It has even "froze up" on me( I was trying crossover with MS proggies).
Until the propeller heads figure out that Linux will never be squat till they get it user friendly, we are stuck with MS. Yes, I tried 2 Mac's. Glorified Linux. They are too expensive for what they do. Also, I have programs that ONLY work on a PC, so I won't quit using software I paid $900 for to try something else. I don't think MetaStock has a Mac version. and I haven't got it to work on crossover.
Getting something to boot on a PC isn't the same as beating Bill Gates. He's still way ahead,IMHO, even with all the warts. Hopefully he will come out with SP3 for XP so when I have to format C: about 3 times a year, I won't have to download 58 upgrades and reboot 32 times.
Until you start looking at other OS's, you can cuss Billy boy all day. In reality, it does pretty well everything people want right outa the box.
I've started deploying SLED peripherally on my network: using it to lock down 6 public access machines, and am prepping a migration of my company's intranet from a Win2K server to a SLED server.
I had to go through three different "live" CD distros before I could find one that would even run at all on my machine. (Slax finally fit the bill. Works nicely. But you have to do a bit of command-line typing before it starts into a GUI.)
I have very mainstream hardware. (ECS motherboard with nVidia nForce chipset, AMD Athlon XP CPU, 1.5 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 7600 graphics on AGP, IDE hard disk, DVD ROM, Multi-DVD RW, USB, etc. etc..)
The hangup was usually on the graphics, of all things! I mean, come on people! You can't get much more standard on a PC than an nVidia graphics chip. But over and over again, X (or Gnome, or KDE) would tweak out and splatter my screen with garbage.
Windows has been successfully detecting correct resolutions and refresh rates for graphics for years now. Couldn't someone in the FOSS/Gnu/Linux world figure that out too?
Well, I’m just a normal guy looking for a new home computer system, since our old one finally reached it’s end. We’ve always used MS Windows, and I’ve actually had good luck with Dell systems going all the way back to the mid-90’s.
I’m savvy enough to know that you really want to give a new OS a year or so to let them work out all the bugs. But, I needed a new system, so I ordered a Dell Dimension E521, with 2G RAM, 320G hard drive, new Dell monitor and printer. I was very impressed, INITIALLY, with Vista. It seemed pretty cool. However, within days of getting the machine, it seemed that more and more driver incompatibility issues would arise. So, I went through customer no-service quite a bit, which most of the time didn’t fix the problem, and created worse problems. Like intermitently the machine would hang at start-up on the Dell screen, freezing at loading BIOS. Horrible.
In the end, I just boxed everything up and sent the whole system back for a full refund. Lesson learned. My next step will be to go to the local system builder (Milwaukee PC) who is right down the street, and have them build me a similar system. Fortunately, I just found out that they will load XP on the machine if that is my preference.
Does anyone out there read the above and have any other advice for me???? I’d really appreciate it!
Hey, if it doesn’t run, it’s immune to viruses.
I guess it's just an opinion thing, but I don't think 2000 was that much above NT. When looking back on 2000, it's interesting to see those who like it complain about Vista's stability and polish. 2000 was unusable until SP1, and not really stable until SP2.
Don’t know what else to tell you, Vista Ultimate with Aero is working just fine on this laptop with only 512Mb RAM, maybe I’ll put a video up on youtube or something so you can see it. So the whole world can see it, since there’s so many claiming it’s not possible.
I do have to admit I just noticed ALL of the video memory isn’t shared, I knew this model had “shared” video memory but apparently it does actually have 64Mb onboard as well. I’m also driving an external monitor at 1280x768 and 32 bit color and everything looks great and works great, if I have time to make and post a video this weekend I will, there’s really not much if any difference in noticable performance between it and my other laptop that has 2Gb RAM and shared video of 32Mb. Of course I’m not editing video or other extremely intensive tasks, but for basic tasks I’ve not had a single hickup.
I was working on a 3B20 at Pacific Bell in May 1983. That's where I first started writing in C++ on one of the earliest releases that Stroustrup made inside the Bell System. In contrast, I was writing in C on my Heathkit H-8 using the Software Toolworks C compiler for CP/M in the same time frame. Can you imagine taking 20 minutes to compile the old word count "wc.c" executable? After 3 iterations, the gimbaled read/write head on my 8" floppy drive fell off. A few months later I received the first releast of UNIX-1100 from Bellcore to load up on the UNISYS 1100-72. It wasn't quite ready for prime time. I took a couple weeks to fix the tty interfaces to the GCS (general communications subsystem) and also modify the segment swapping routine in the kernel to handle the large number of users and tasks. The consolation prize was having a real UNIX system with full source code to everything in 1983. It was another 2 years before the first feeble attempts at Linux, FreeBSD and similar items appeared.
True, but that's expected with MS operating systems. For the servers I maintain, 2000 has been night-and-day better than NT 4. We didn't deploy 2000 until SP2 was out. We're just now rolling out Server 2003 in a major way, since SP2 has been released.
That helps quite a bit.
there’s really not much if any difference in noticable performance between it and my other laptop that has 2Gb RAM and shared video of 32Mb.
The other laptop is configured for half the minimum video memory required. Sure that's not a typo? If not, it's understandable why it runs so slow too. Configure your shared graphics memory to 128 or 256 MB and watch things get a lot faster.
You'll love the new IIS if you're using it, with different web sites and different worker processes, each easily tuned for resource usage. Watch out, SSI is implemented very differently since the previous version was Swiss cheese for security.
do it. two weeks ago i bought a new toshiba notebook with vista loaded. vista is absolute crap and you need to do very close research on which of your periperals have vista drivers. this was my last msft purchase. buck fill.
Why don’t you just image your machine instead of going thru the hassles of reinstalling everything?
Sounds like you've hit it on the head.
If you have a reliable local shop that can custom build a box for you that runs a fully updated copy of XP Pro...you are good to go.
I'm jealous. I wish I had the dough to take the plunge for a new system with lots of high end hardware. I'll just have to be patient.
Yes, typo, 32Mb “onboard” not shared ( I think shared was 256). Do all laptops with “shared” have some small bit of onboard? All I’ve checked today do. I’ll admit I was surprised how well Utimate with Aero is running with only 512, but it is doing quite well, especially after it “settled in”.
Bump
I am going to jump in here on this. I called Dell the day before yesterday to see if they would sell me a laptop with XP. They said they would not. The same thing happened with Gateway and HP. My wife needed a new laptop for her genealogy work and I finally bought a refurbished unit from HP. That was the only way I could find a laptop with XP on it. I tried Office Depot, Staples, Office Max, Sam's club, Circuit City and Best Buy. All of them did not have a laptop with XP.
This is called TurboCache for nVidia and HyperMemory for ATI. They have a small frame buffer just for the GPU to get around latency to RAM.
So for notebook #1 you actually have the full 512 available if you're only running the GPU with 64MB (barely enough to run low-resolution Aero). You can assign more and get the benefits of more video memory, but then you'll be competing with the rest of the system for RAM and lowering the amount of available system RAM. Probably better to let it act like a discreet card for now. You're still skimming above bare Vista usability.
For notebook #2 you must be using some additional system RAM because that 32MB won't cut it. Since you are now acting like integrated graphics you will get a performance hit due to both the system and the GPU contending for memory resources.
He was referring to businesses, which you can find easily by going to dell.com, choosing small business then selecting XP on the left menu. Try telling them you want it for your business, but I’d recommend going ahead with Vista if you’re buying something new, would save you the cost and pain of upgrading later.
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