You want XP, we'll keep XP

[Elie]

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9927721-7.html?tag=newsmap

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company could re-evaluate its plans to phase out Windows XP by June 30, if customers demand that it stick around. So far, they have not.

"XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter, but right now, we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer said during a Thursday news conference in Belgium, according to Reuters.

and...

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/vista-Windows-XP,news-1144.html

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has offered to keep selling Windows XP beyond June 30, when it is scheduled to come to the end of its life - if customers show that they truly want it. By truly want it, Microsoft means that sales of Vista will have to plummet and sales of XP will have to explode in the coming two months.

[Dr Mordrid]

We can only hope M$ - and most particularly Ballmer - "wakes up smarter", but recent history isn't in its favor

[Belwarrior]

i'm sure i saw an online petition for keeping XP around somewhere, in any case the number of people and businesses downgrading their Vista PCs to XP (eg from DELL) should be a clear indication.

If that is not people's demand then what is according to him?

[Dr Mordrid]

Remember we're talking about Steve Ballmer, the personification of industrial scale tone deafness and bloviation.

[UtwigMU]

OEMs are already offering predowngraded machines that come with Vista business/ultimate stickers, XP preinstalled and Vista restore media.

I was to some partner event recently and everyone told same story. Untill restore media became abundant everyone was just charging customers ~100 euros for Vista downgrade (format, install XP, install drivers and OEM CD burning and DVD watching apps). And almost all business and a lot of consumer machines are XP.

[Nowhere]

They have to keep XP anyway - Vista is totally inadequate for Asus Eee - style devices and MS doesn't want millions (?) of people to find out that this Linux thing that comes with their new small & cheap laptop is totally adequate for their needs.

Of course that doesn't help much if we want XP on "proper" laptop.

BTW, how "Vista -> XP" downgrading works anyway in light of all this? I can downgrade any machine that comes with Vista to XP only untill June 30? What if I want to reinstall OS after that date?

[Admiral]

I'm curious what passes for customer feedback at M$ ?

[UtwigMU]

I don't know about other OEMs but HP and Lenovo offer XP or Vista restore CDs on request. I sold a Thinkpad to a friend, emailed distributor and XP restore CDs were in an envelope on my desk next day.

HPs come with either Vista, Vista sticker and predowngraded to XP or free DOS. With free DOS you either have volume licencing or access to restore CDs and can sleep without the sticker on your PC. With Vista you can get XP downgrade CDs uppon call.

This will be untill January 09, then it might be extended untill June/July.

[Claymonkey]

The way the Vista->XP downgrade worked for one of my clients was like this:

You bought a single XP VLK license (I can't recall the price but it was at worst a couple hundred dollars). You then could use that VLK for ANY computer you had with a valid Vista Business license sticker (ie OEM). This honestly sounded completely wonky to me but it was told to us by a CDW rep with a MS rep on the phone with him.

I'm assuming if your company already has a VLK for your site you can just keep using it for incoming Vista Biz systems.

The biggest problem is some of the newer laptops and desktops are 'built for Vista' and getting XP drivers for them is especially annoying if not impossible. Sony is really bad about it and Toshiba was extremely annoying and I had to find drivers from alternate sources for things like the function keys.

[Dr Mordrid]

Fortunately with XP you can often force it to use a driver for another NT based system. I did this with a RAID card that didn't have an XP driver - I just "forced" it to use the Win2K driver and all was well. So far, so good when clearing Vista off our Toshiba laptops.

[Fluff]

If you dont give users local admin rights in XP and you have Vista with UAC. Which one is more of a pain?

[MultimediaMan]

Neither, if you plan accordingly...

The UAC is a nice concept, but poorly executed.

Setting up an environment where typical users can work normally without admin rights is not all that difficult most of the time. The hard part is anticipating the actual real-world usage scenarios with some goofy 3rd. party software. Desktop workstations are ususally fairly simple. CAD workstations can be a little more complicated, as can some high power actuarial programs. The worst "user" scenario you can ever encounter is the lowly auto-login "kiosk user" which is usually locked down six ways from Sunday, from last month to next year. Diagnosing and resolving issues on severely locked-down accounts can be very time consuming.

[Elie]

I'm actually glad Vista's days are over, nothing but bloated code that ran extremely slow with tons of annoyances.

Check this out, I think there is some truth to their predictions...

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=664&tag=nl.e101

[UtwigMU]

We have local administrators on XP except in one shop where they have policy and users are users. We have a lot more remote support issues with that shop. No corporate client is moving to Vista for now.

We have 3 kiosks which are SuSE 10.3, were Fedora 6.

[Dr Mordrid]

Check this out, I think there is some truth to their predictions...
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hi...64&tag=nl.e101

Personally, I'm hoping for this....