News Microsoft offering XP downgrade

I am also happy with vista, it is a great product, the problem is the lazy developers of popular business programs do not fix their software to work under vista. For the home user vista is perfectly fine, asuming you got a nice new pc, i woudlnt get vista on your 2 or 3 year old XP machine.
Once developers of business apps start to get off their fat lazy arses and fix their software, I am sure we will see a bigger increase of business users with vista.

 

the large company I work for only just 18mths ago moved over to XP, it's going to be a long time before we move upto Vista

 

good point. i didn't realise such problems such as employee don't think for themselves or software compatibility and fee for upgrading problems.

so to correct my statement, i shall say why the hell do Microsoft offer Ultimate downgrades? i dream to have Ultimate where university only provided Business for free
normally, manufactures don't put Ultimate unless they are sure it's a beast of a machine for home users (?) so why have downgrades when the machine won't have software problems, nor will it have any hardware speed problem?

 

Ultimate seems to have fallen between 2 stools, for home users, Home Premium comes with everything they need, and without a load of stuff stuff that would slow the computer down. for Business users, Ultimate is too expensive.

The only people that would buy it are people like us, that buy it either coz its "ultimate" or we are getting it cheap as an OEM deal.

 

Or on the school deal.

I installed XP on my laptop because it just works so much smoother and I need all the space that the vista takes compared to xp. I should switch over to linux all the way.

 

This sort of system "downgrade rights" has been in place since XP PRO was introduced for those slower migraters from 2000.

It is open to business licencsing customers including Office products. Hence the reason why only Business and Ultimate get it.

Ok i admit partially, that because of incompatibilities and products requiring patching, this is why most IT departments test thoroughly what will work and what wont before a rollout, but not only that to enable a smoother migration process. Typical example a business client still has another yr or 2 of tax obligations before he can effectively replace all the pcs in a department but that rogue one or 2 pcs that die and need to be replaced before their EOL cannot have an OEM licence taken from one pc to another needs to purchase new licenses along with the replacement pcs, providing he doesnt have an open business/value deal with Microsoft already.

The company may find and through their own testing that inhouse software is not compatible yet with vista and therefore dictates the need to have XP or 2000 reinstalled onto the new laptop or desktop. Along with many other reasons why a business needs this flexibility.

I work in the IT Industry as a PC Tech liasing with customers from industrial sites down to the home user and have done for the last 10 years and funny the same agruments abound 5-6 years ago when XP first came out comparing how crap it was to 2000. Now alot of ppl sing its praises over Vista, please. Ill see the same type of people, if not the exact same people doing the same thing next desktop OS release.

If you are going to post this sort of dribble as news then have something thats breaking ground not something ill prepared or is typical of sensational journalism and trying to stir up the same old argument of which OS is better or MS admission of guilt over a crap product.

 

People always say the toughest competitor to Vista is XP.

Maybe those XP guys should start learning Vista and gain immediate benefit from then on.

 

as an IT contractor i have to very much disagree with this statement. it isn't that the developers are lazy it is that companies are getting sick and tires of spending tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading when it is not necessary. I know more companies who will not upgrade to vista because it would require complete relicensing on products at absolutely no gain to them at all. so they are forced to spend a$$loads of $$$$$$ on a products that is slower (vista) and has less compatibility than xp to begin with. then you get into how much of a resource pig vista is. companies then have to upgrade hardware and spend even more $$$$, they are just getting sick of upgrading for the sake of upgrading. if they do not get any new real functionality out of a product that actually helps production, and i am all with them on this, why upgrade? anyway there is about an infinite amount more reasons not to upgrade to vista, but hey we do not have time to go over all them here

 

At work we have just been upgraded to XP a couple of months ago, only because MS dont support NT workstation anymore. THats the goverment for you, try to keep hold of the oldest tech thats cheap.

 

Hi,

I will give you my thoughts based on my previous experience on a IT support contractor, and present as the "IT guy" in a medium size company with 120 users.
Vista is crap on business enviroment. Why?

a) Software. Accounting, CAD, 3D design packages, including multifactional photocopiers/printers etc are not supported. Those "louzy devs" someone said above, will write code for Vista when they have the knowledge how it works. And then you have to buy the licences again. There is software out there who cost thousands to get (3D Studio, AutoCad). There are hundred of thousands of civil employees people who still work with Access 97 applications under Win 98. End. The people will continue working with them until the next multi million allowance comes from the goverment in 2020.

b) Shared server folders, network disk drives, wireless network drives and server managed Vista clients. Are not working. Try to turn off a UPnP router on your network and all Vista machines will crash.

c) 95% of employees do not have a clue where the applications are. They never went above the START button menu and they work with the shortcuts I put on their desktops. They are lost when they log in on another machine without activated roaming profiles. They cannot even find the shortcuts when they rearrange them. I did a test to some of them and load them a VM with linux and desktop looking exactly like XP. The people worked fine with the only complains were about coloured windows. They didn't even realise they are working on different OS. And all our software runs on Linux too.

d) So what's the benefits of Vista over XP in managed business enviroment? NONE. Vista is DX10. DX10 is for gaming not for work. Vista is like Exchange 2007. TOTAL USELESS compared with Exchange 2003.

 

good post

its not in Business intrest to upgrade there pcs to Vista

1 most of there pcs are running windows 2000 or XP
2 most of the pcs probly only have 256mb ram or 512 that will not work with vista (nuff 512mb vista is unuseable needs 1gb min or 2gb recommended 3 gb for High video setting gameing)
3 cpus in most of there pcs probly going to be under
4 support err support what support (user ring up i installed something from the internet and my pc does not work any more, support rep say pop the Vista disk in and format and reload hang up) most mallware Brakes vista at this time as its ment to work on XP

its going to take +5 years before business upgrade but if all there stuff is working on XP no point in upgradeing most business will not upgrade coes there £5000 software will not work on vista and the companys that sell that software will want like another £3000 for an upgrade

as well as the problems with vista and networking i made sure all my customers in an good post

its not in Business intrest to upgrade there pcs to Vista

as well as the problems with vista and networking i made sure all my customers in an business place do not use vista as 80% of there software thay have that is +1/2 years old Will not work on it, home users i allso put off an little as well

the only reason i can see business wanting vista if thay want DX10 and maybe the secuity but it means your going to have to give trianing to all there chickens that use there pcs as i find most of them do not know whare the start button is and only look at whats on the desktop

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to run Vista (properly) you need an Dual core cpu and 1gb of ram but should use 2gb if you use lots of programs (you can use 512mb but you be there all day wating for programs to open)
to run XP 512mb and any single core cpu but 1gb is better but most stuff will run happy with 512mb (you can use 256mb and get away with it but not as bad as vista)

XP gameing 2gb of ram
vista gameing 3gb/4gb of ram (so the maps can Fit in ram and stops windows from pageing alot)

 

*lol*
That's really great.

 

XP works and people know how to use it. For the average business or home user, there is just no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista, apart from making stuff look more shiny.

That's my opinion anyway.

 

surprised the government doesn't move to Linux or something, free is good

 

but all the software works on windows so it proly cost more money as well as support you cant just plug an linux box in and expect it to work, you need an admin who knows linux and all the hardare would have to be the same to cut support, not going to happen

 

I have been reading over the replies and it amounts to xp user/ microsoft bashing ,yes vista has problems ( anyone trying to run crysis will tell you that) and that xp is faster more stable. if you consider the length of time xp has been out for I am not surprised as MS has had time to eek out the bugs in the OS and with vista being a relitivly new OS it has issues for now a dual boot would be the way to go.