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Over the past 3 weeks, I have bought 3 brand new PCs from Dell. A 17″ laptop for my husband, a 15″ laptop for me, and a Dimension desktop for my mother in law. And Windows Vista came on all 3. I don’t like it, the systems are slower than my other computers, and I really just wanted XP. It did what I needed it to do. I have no interest in flashy pretty interfaces. I just want to get my work done! And now, this….
Friday, April 20, 2007
Dell Reinstates Windows XP As New PC Option
Dell, beaten to a pulp by the stick of public demand, is reinstating Windows XP as an option on new PCs, reversing a January decision to shift entirely to Vista.
You can now grab Home or Professional XP from the bullet points on their configurator, which has for the last three months been a giant ad for their competitors, as far as PC owners unwilling to deal with Vista’s quirks are concerned.
Why would Dell take action that Microsoft would rather it not take? The magic line, “Dell is currently the second-largest PC seller in the world” is why: the top spot was recently nabbed by HP, which, as of today, still foists compulsory Vista on us, at least when buying from their online store.
Remember that Microsoft plans to retire XP in only eight months. The brass balls required to kill off your most popular product to force people to buy its sequel speaks to a breathtaking degree of market control, and that they don’t have any fear whatsoever of OSX or Linux. As a crude but, I hope, effective analogy, could you imagine Sony taking the PS2 off the shelves to “force” people to buy PlayStation3?
The BBC has a great quote in its story, wherein a Gartner analyst wonders why people would prefer XP over Vista. Talk about the ivory tower…
FIGURES.
Being a Dell user myself (a Latitude D800 laptop in the living-room and a Dimension 8300 desktop in the home office/studio), I was also interested in this story. Like you, I really like XP - installed on both machines - and have no wish to change to Vista.
I’m not even sure my laptop will run it properly. It has 1GB RAM, which would probably be OK, but only 64MB on the GeForce video card and it now struggles trying to run today’s resource-intensive applications. It worries me that Microsoft are talking about no longer supporting XP by the end of this year.
My laptop cost me around £2,300 ($4,600 at today’s rate) when new in 2003 and I take exception to being forced to consider buying another one next year just to keep up with Microsoft’s aggressive marketing policies regarding its operating system. Vista’s poor record in running legacy programs is also worrying as I have a number of older applications which I gather may not run on Vista. Who in their right mind would want to take that chance when one’s business depends on being able to migrate smoothly from one operating system to another?
Let’s hope they see sense and give us XP lovers at least a few more years support … !
Here I am Renee, a mere month after posting my last comment on this topic, and I’ve just taken delivery of a new Dell laptop - the XPS M1710 gaming beastie - and yes, I ordered it with Windows XP :)
A magnificent machine. Read about it at my blog.
Cheers, m’dear!