Sales of boxed Vista copies down over XP

Cnet ^ | 02/15/2007 | Ina Fried

[JohnSheppard]

Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista at retail stores significantly trailed those of Windows XP in each product's first week on shelves, according to new figures from NPD.

The market research firm's data showed the number of copies of Vista purchased was nearly 59 percent less than the number for its predecessor XP, looking at the first week of sales. Revenue was also down, but less dramatically, with the dollar value of first-week Vista sales off 32 percent from that seen with XP.

Vista went on sale both on retail shelves and on new PCs on January 30. Businesses with volume license contracts have been able to get the new operating system since November.

Although boxed-copy sales were weaker, PC sales during the launch week were up 67 percent over computer sales in the same week a year earlier, NPD analyst Chris Swenson noted.

"Thus, the preliminary data suggests that consumers are getting the message that they need a more robust system to take advantage of some of the new features in Vista, and thus a relatively smaller number are opting to upgrade older machines with the new OS themselves," Swenson wrote in an e-mail.

[Fire_on_High]

WinME was never this much of a cluster, in fact it's downright nice. The popular opinion of it seems based on what everyone's HEARD, what their brother's girlfriend's sister's best friend supposedly had happen with it.

I use it daily. Far less hassle.

[lmr]

Do you use WinMe or Vista? I actually have 3 systems. My new one, Athlon AMD Duo 4600+ with Vista, An Intel P4 2.4Ghx with XP, and an Intel 733Mhz Celeron with WinMe.

My wife uses the WinMe system. She is only Internet surfing and playing games at Pogo.com as well as playing Music Videos. WinMe is stable doing these tasks and no additional hardware needs to be added.

My XP System has an ATI Radeo 9550 Video card, a Soundblaster X-Fi audio surround card and a TV Tuner. I used it for virtually everything. It got to be very sluggish on video editing and the HD was a little worn out, so I bought a new system.

Vista is fast on my new system but that may have more to do with the Dual Athlon 4600+ than Vista itself. I also have the newer (I believe SATA) hard drive which is much faster than IDE and DDR2 memory, which is also faster than the DDR in my XP system.

Right now, I am using the 2 computers (they share a monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse using a KV switch.)because not everything works on my Vista system. Movie Maker works way better on the new system, though.

What you need really depends on what you are using it for. Most people don't need dual processors and 2 gigs of memory and could get by with a 30 gig HD if they still sold 'em.

[B4Ranch]

Have you read this?

http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html?partner=globalnews_newsletter

[Philip_the_evangelist]

doesn't even work on Linux

Actually, both the FA311v1 and FA311v2 work just fine with Linux. You're pointing to a page quoting Netgear's official postion, not reality.

[Echo Talon]

just what the page says, it's junk hardware... if you have junk... use linux(and even then you may well have problems IF you're talking about certain winmodems and such **yes SOME work, some don't**)

[Philip_the_evangelist]

it's junk hardware

Interesting, if somewhat incoherent, response. The page merely points out that it's at EOL and that they aren't going to support it. There's nothing particularly junk about it.

[Echo Talon]

look

Companies generally don't abandon "good" hardware... "it's JUNK"

[Richard Kimball]

WinME was never this much of a cluster, in fact it's downright nice.

That's a classic case of YMMV. ME was what sent me to Apple. I had just started getting seriously into photography, and WinNT, although it had been fairly stable, had a terrible time connecting to my camera or USB readers. I tried ME, because MS was selling it as being the OS to use for the new peripherals. It had an annoying habit of killing the USB ports when I'd eject a flash card. I had to delete the USB ports, then start an install new hardware wizard and reinstall them. That worked about a third of the time, but I usually had to reboot before the wizard would find them.

The color balance on my printer changed radically from print to print on ME. One afternoon, I spent about $40 worth of ink and paper trying to get the printer and computer synched, but it never did much good because the printer would print the same photo with dramatic changes in color between two prints done one after the other.

Interestingly enough, upgrading the video card was the killer, and that wasn't MS's fault. The CD that came with it didn't do anything but install adware. They hadn't included a driver on the disk, but all the adware was designed to look like it was installing the driver. Finally, I found the driver at their web site, but Windows kept stating it wasn't the correct driver. I had to override several warnings to get it to take, but once every couple of weeks it would lose it, and I'd have to do the force override thing again. A few weeks later I bought my first Mac.

[Poser]

XP works fine. I won't buy Vista until I get a new computer.

[Philip_the_evangelist]

Hmmm...exactly what I said. So, your position is that when a company creates a new version of something and subsequently quits supporting the older version(s) that this is an indisputable indication that the previous version(s) was/were junk?

[Echo Talon]

pretty much, when you can a card for $10.99 that's WAY better than what he has.... well... that "old" one is JUNK...