June 18th: Last day to buy a Dell with XP, penalty free
By Thomas Ricker 
posted June 16th 2008 3:40AM
posted June 16th 2008 3:40AM
When the clock strikes midnight on June 18th, Dell will discontinue its sales of XP systems. The move allows Dell to meet the imposed June 30th deadline which requires the industry to cease shipment of XP machines. That is, unless you're in the market for a netbook or nettop in which case Microsoft is happy for vendors to continue shipping XP in order to Update: Details are now posted at Dell.
Wasn't sarcasm, more like a humor. Go read some of the comments in Engadget's iPhone coverage and you might get it.
"Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see." -- John Lennon
Ah, good old microstuffed.
They still don't realise that THIS kind of shit, forcing suppliers to withdraw XP is EXACTLY why people are pissed off with them!
I WAS considering buying a new system this year, but not now. I do not want the Vista 'experience' thank you very much. I'll just carry on with the old shit I have.
Again, playing devil's advocate, the withdrawal from sale of old products when you have a replacement is normal. Apple, for example, never sells old versions of OS X, and I'm not seeing options to download versions of Ubuntu other than the current one (this, I will add, after a 10-second check of their site, so I may be wrong here).
Clearly it would be preferable that Vista was a great product and therefore there would be no question that a new PC with Vista would be better than a new PC with XP. However, Microsoft aren't going to help themselves by continuing to sell XP such that they need to continue to support it for longer, along with Vista. That they've continued to sell XP at all for so long since Vista's release is honestly surprising.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes
Click on "More >>" for the version you want. Click on the download link contained therein.
@Andir3.0
Hmm, I thought those 10-seconds of research was time well spent but evidentially I was wrong. Good call.
Arguably, it's under relase notes and not downloads... so I guess I can consider it obscure :p
tbh I don't mind vista, ran it back in beta 2 days and was a nice OS in it's own, but s**t did it make my PC feel like it had hardware from teh 80's.
If you got teh money for a decent spec PC (and I've seen it run on a high speccer) it works faultlessly.
Me? I jumped ship to teh Linux bandwagon, no need to upgrade your PC if there's a new release ;)
Debian pwns ^^
Wow, big Debian fan here. Recently did a asterisk computer. S#$t F&*k, after I installed Debian, three hours, it took me three hours to figure out that I needed to delete xorg.conf so that x could see my video card and monitor... That was after I failed to manually edit xorg.conf and put the computer into a state where it was trying to launch x, but then failing, so it would try to launch x again. Which kinda sucks, because I never was able to get it to work properly with my kvm switch so I ended up doing it all cli anyhow, and I certainly didn't want to mess with samba after all that, so I did all my editing in vi.
That and asterisk was out of date, so I had to rebuild it. So after apt-get install all the development tools, I was back to ./configure make make install for configure. Well after I installed subversion... because no version I could just download seemed to work so I eventuall had to install the complete build environment.
But all things considered, linux has come a long way since I first started using it 15 years ago. But yeah, its still way off on the horizon for use on the desktop. wayyy wayyy off, naw, is never gonna happen, it will be what it is now, forever. A curiosity for computer nerds.
So yeah a one off linux computer install is very nearly beyond the capabilities of a "linux expert", but yeah, other than that its starting to get not total suckage in that capacity...
i was going to switch to vista until i heard that programs like EndNote were still having compatability problems... :/
Can you add to the article that this seems to be for the consumer side. On the business side we have this deal for the Optiplex line of systems as well.
Thanks! [Dell Business Customer]
I support PCs for way too many hours of my already short life.
Vista is a nightmare, created by idiots, not to make IT any easier, but 'just because it's new'.
So take your DX10 and your UAC and your other Vista-loving, and go jump off a cliff.
XP pwns you. Vista is the Millenium Edition of Windows XP, and the sooner you admit it, the better.
I recall Windows XP being terrible, and was called ME2, and that Microsoft doesn't know how to make Operating system anymore. And they should what they do best... Encarta.
Now you like XP... hmmm..
Why don't you Actually use Vista next time. If you have problems blame your hardware manufacture that refuse to make proper Vista drivers, probably so that you buy their better model.
Sorry but many companies like, Hauppauge, HP, Lexmark, Creative, Intel... really cash in on this vista thing.
I don't remember that at all. The only problem I had migrating customers to XP from 98SE when it came out were driver issues. ME was hated for lack of stability as an operating system as well as the constant need to defrag. XP alleviated those problems under most circumstances in the business environment as well as adding extra features for networking. So with XP we waited for the first SP to make sure manufacturers were ready to support devices plugged into the machine and everything was fine.
Vista on the other hand has no business oriented features over XP except for their silly upgrade to XP's security center and on-the-fly defragging. Since most of my customers use Norton Corporate tied to a central server I don't care about the OS knowing the virus scanner's current state, and since most of my customers don't change their computer's software configuration more than once a year the systems rarely need defragging if ever.
How could ANY computer be considered "Penalty-Free" when it contains ANY version of Windows ?
Ha!
I don't see the problem of continuing to sell it, I for one would and will purchase XP until Vista has matured fully, but by then Microsoft will sell you Windows 7 that 20% faster then Vista, and 20% fewer bugs (because we were to lazy to patch them on Vista).
Vista at its launch, should never have been launched.
I think this is insane that microsoft is pushing people into an operating system they dont want, regaurdless of weither it is "better" or "slower" or whatever, we are CUSTOMERS and if we do not like a product we shouldnt have to change just because a company says so. i recently switched to a Mac because of all of the Vista drama. I am not a fanboy but i really do love the whole mac experence, esp for a home machine. i think that, which is already happening if youve been to a best buy lately, there will be a huge shift in domenince of the consumer computing market towrads non-windows machines, and towards Apple or Linux. this is a good thing, we should not forget who is in power here, we chose what we buy, when we buy it, and why. Not Microsoft. Send a message to big M and dont go vista.
Every software company is guilty of the same thing...
A new version comes out, and drop out immediately support for the old version. Very few companies even support their older version.. and usually it only for a couple of months and slowly remove it. So, I don't see the problem here.
Ah so you love Mac... ok well next update on MAC OS (after snow leopard) prepare to change your system, as upgrade is not a question.
Already PowerMac CPU will be dropped on the next update that offer nothing more then bug fixes (based on what Steve job said). And go, pay your Service Packs. Apple moto: let's make a buggy OS, and fix everything later for 3-4 versions, and slowly drop support to ensure everyone keeps buying our new system.
I am not saying that Mac OS is bad or anything. I am just saying that Apple is just as guilty as Microsoft. And what you feel on your mac is probably a psychological effect that you have as Apple has a nice image compared to Microsoft, like a placebo effect of some sort.
Vista VS XP test
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2303830,00.asp
Vista pretty much equalled and surpassed XP.
Awsome, this is one of the very few test that was perform (comparing XP against Vista) that was properly made. Most review sites, even good review sites, cripple Vista by disabling key core feature and start saying how Vista sucks. Yea... lets do a race you and I, and I'll cut your leg leave you bleeding to death... I wonder who will win...
I had a Vostro 400 from Dell for my work PC and Decided to go with Vista Business. All was well in the first month or so, then I randomly began getting program crashes over and over again. I had to restart my computer about 5 times a day to get all of my programs to run in one boot up.
After having enough of the program crashes I finally formatted the thing and all "seemed" well. About 10 mins into reinstalling my apps, drivers, etc I got crashes again. My updates continued to fail back to back. I kept getting update errors that I could never seem to get resolved.
After another format I got blue screen every time I booted the PC. I called dell and they sent a repair tech to come and check out the hardware. They replaced the RAM and hard drive with an entirely new Vista partition and it worked for about a day and then blue screen again......
I am now running windows XP without flaws and headaches. These errors were post SP1 as well. After installing SP1 I got major crashing issues. I am not sure how relative this problem is amongst Dell PCs in general, but I would NEVER buy another Dell with Vista on it. Once I saw that they were stopping the sales of XP on their systems I was uneasy. I sure hope they have all of the kinks worked out of their systems now.
I personally have a customized Lenovo PC at home with vista home premium which runs like clockwork. Vista is a great OS, Microsoft and other companies just have to work out the consistency issues.
Jared you probably have something that is bad on your dell computer, you should send it back by calling Dell. I know I know they will make you pass through procedures for 2 hours, before they decide to RMA and send you a pre-paid box to put your computer in. But computers is a nice investment, and should not suffer from it. It has nothing to do with Vista.
The reason is that Vista does NOT like if your system is not working at 100%. One reason is that, Vista now doesn't like approximation value and then has perform error correction on every peace of binary numbers it gets... it's waits of computer power. So it wants exact value.
If you have installed software on your Dell machine running Vista, then that is probably the cause. You probably installed a software that does some Windows hacking to give you something (usually these program are very badly made and should be avoided at all cost) and it doesn't like Vista. Or it could be that a Vista drivers that Dell put inside is buggy.
Also I know that the only system you should buy form Dell is the XPS series or high end business class, else you are up for trouble.
Translation: Buy a bunch of copies of XP now, wait a while, sell them and make the cash money.
I thought we went over this one a year ago? Anyway in my estimation Vista is crap end of story, Maybe the ultimate version, might be a good alternative to xp, but xp still stands the test of time, and dell was very accommadating to still offer it as an option, its unfortunate that microsoft is discontinuing it. at least they still offer the classic start menu, you will always have that.