Buy a new computer with Windows XP?

July 1, 2009

[geege]

I just got a nice “E-Machine”....not too expensive and was glad that it had XP instead of Vista....

[Nateman]

There is a third choice.

[RichardW]

I’ve been using Vista at home on three computers and it has worked fine. But I upgraded to the trial version of Windows 7 recently on my laptop which I am using now. It can be purchased for $49.95 for a limited time and the free version will continue to operate just fine until March 2010 at which time it will shut down at periodic intervals reminding people to upgrade. You have burn a disc and install it but it was pretty seamless to be truthful. I think it will be fine and in my opinion a good deal better than XP. I think this whole XP/Vista controversy is a lot of nothing except for corporate users and dedicated software. For most software home Vista users will do just fine as will Windows 7.

BTW, I’m no computer wizard but the Windows 7 download went rather well. Time consuming but I’m glad I did it. Looks pretty good to me. But again I had no problems with Vista either.

I will probably put Windows 7 on all three home computers. I also use Firefox and Thunderbird. Works fine.

[RichardW]

Well stated. I couldn’t agree more.

[Pyro7480]

That looks awesome! Thanks for the tip. I may just get one.

[peyton randolph]

Glad to help. Very pleased with the netbook. Note that it only comes with a trial version of MSOffice. Means you’ll either need to pay for that if you want it or use free OpenOffice instead. I installed OpenOffice, Thunderbird, AVG free, and several other applications. All have worked well.

[max americana]

> You could also embrace the ‘Darkside’,
either use bit torrent or binary newsgroups, there are versions of XP which can use auto-update without a problem and do not require registration.<

...this “friend that I know” (cough)has 5 versions of XP thru mininova. MOST of them dont’ need registration plus 1 of them amazingly was created with the Vista Aero interface. why 5? For future events from MS that will eventually outlaw XP.

[TexasRepublic]

How does your friend know the pirated versions of XP aren’t security compromised? They could be monitoring keystrokes for logins and passwords.

[normanpubbie]

Here are some possibilities:

Option 1. Buy a new PC with XP Pro installed
I went to Tiger Direct, which sells a lot of computer hardware and software but only via the Internet. According to their listing, they sell 93 laptop models with XP Pro and 104 desktop models with XP Home or Pro.
Other vendors will have these too. Look around the 'Net.

Option 2. Buy a new PC, nuke the hard drive to get rid of Vista, and install a clean copy of XP
A number of vendors, including Newegg and Tiger Direct, still sell OEM versions of XP Pro and even XP Home.

Option 3. Buy a Vista PC which has a "downgrade" XP option
You pay the vendor for the downgrade, of course.

Option 4. Convert your existing Vista PC to a dual-boot Vista/Windows 7 machine
Easy to do on a Vista system. Right-click on My Computer, left-click Manage, and then left-click Disk Management to show the existing partitions on the drive. Right-click on the C: drive (Vista partition) and shrink it by 20 GB. Then download the Windows 7 Release Candidate ISO file to your PC, burn it onto a DVD, and use the DVD to install Windows 7 in the new partition. The machine will now dual-boot, with Windows 7 being the default system. You will doubtless see a performance improvement of 7 over Vista. Who knows? Maybe you'll be happier with 7 than Vista.

Option 5. Same as Option 4 except install XP instead of 7

[woollyone]

Dell small business is THE way to buy the Dell.

Yes, XP is available.
More importantly the service support is excellent and for small business purchases, the tech support is exclusively US based, not India.