Computer makers appear to have found a way to get around Microsoft's deadline for selling PCs with Windows XP as the operating system.
Taking advantage of the "downgrade rights" offered as part of the Windows Vista licence agreement, HP and Dell both plan to offer machines loaded with XP well beyond the 30 June deadline, imposed by Microsoft in a bid to get manufacturers and retailers to focus on XP's successor, Vista.
Technically, the computers will be Vista Business or Vista Ultimate machines that have been factory downgraded to XP at the customer's request. In practice, they are more like XP machines that come with an already paid-for upgrade to Vista when and if the customer chooses to do so.
HP said it plans to continue selling the "pre-downgraded" desktops, notebooks and workstations to its business customers until 30 July, 2009. Dell is already pitching the same option on its website and promising the models will stick around long after it stops taking standard XP orders on 18 June.
Other computer makers have told ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, CNET News.com, that they are still exploring what to do, but that they also want to sell XP beyond 30 June.
There are limits to the approach being taken by HP and Dell, as only the Business and Ultimate flavours of Vista come with downgrade rights, meaning consumer machines can't be sold in a similar fashion.
Kevin Kutz, a director in Microsoft's Windows unit, said the downgrade-rights option meets customer needs. "While [computer makers] continue to see large numbers of customers making the transition to Windows Vista, there are some pockets — like small business — that need a little more time," he said in a statement to CNET News.com. "And from what we've heard from our partners, the downgrade rights option fulfils that need."
The pre-downgraded PC option is just the latest way PC makers have responded to stronger-than-expected demand. After shifting largely to Vista after its January 2007 mainstream launch, Dell and others quickly began adding more XP options in response to customer requests.
For some time now, computer makers have been selling machines with an XP recovery disc as a downgrade option. Lenovo, for example, reportedly plans to keep offering an XP recovery disc with some Vista models through January 2009. The difference with the machines HP and Dell will sell beyond 30 June is that they will have Vista rights but contain XP pre-installed.
As for whether a broader reprieve might yet come for XP, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has left the door open a crack. "XP will hit an end-of-life," Ballmer said recently. "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."
ZDNet.co.uk has asked Microsoft to clarify Ballmer's statement, but had not received a reply at the time of writing.
Talkback
We've got a few machines in the office from Dell. They were, I assume, "downgraded" by request (I wasn't involved with the order). They arrived here with XP installed and configured, licensed and patched. But the sticker on the side of the machine and the DVD that came with it are for Vista.
If you get a "downgraded" (sorry for the quotes - I still see moving to XP as an upgrade), how do you go about reinstalling in the case of a system failure? As far as I can tell, only Vista license details are supplied which won't be accepted as part of an XP install.
This is what happens when there's no strong competition in the market. In what other scenario could one company (Microsoft) tell another almost it's equal (HP) what to do?
In all other aspects of life, you're free to buy an older version, take mobile phones for example; I can still buy a Nokia from 2 years ago because Nokia knows if they turn their backs on a certain group of consumers, one of their competitors will pick it up.
Microsoft on the other hand enjoy a near monopoly in desktop computing, thus they have the luxury to impose deadlines!
My Fujitsu laptop came with Vista preloaded, and included both Vista and XP Professional recovery DVDs. I have moved back and forth between the two, loading each from scratch, several times. As far as I can tell, as long as the recovery installation process is able to determine that I am installing on a Fujitsu laptop, it goes through the entire installation process without asking for the key.
I have had similar experience with Dell computers, although I have not specifically tried this with a dual-licensed system yet. But with XP Home and XP Professional, as long as I was installing from the original Dell recovery disks, on a Dell computer, it never asked for the key; if I installed from the same disks on a non-dell computer, I had to enter a valid key - I used the Dell XP Home recovery CD on an HP desktop once, and I had to enter the key from the label on the HP.
Thing is, this is fine if you have the relevant media... Our Dells only shipped with Vista media, so re-installing XP (which was pre-installed) is impossible without resorting to another license key.
Although, I am now having mental bells ringing about a method of extracting the license key from the registry...
My hard drive failed about 2 months ago and the only way I could recover was to mirror the drive of one of my work colleagues and strip all his data etc off!
It does seem to be vague as to whether CDs will be shipped with forthcoming Dells. I've read stories recently regarding other manufacturers (I think Sony?) who say they'll continue to ship media, possibly at a small cost. Thing is, you can almost guarantee they'll be those ridiculous recovery CDs that format your hard drive and won't allow you to boot to the recovery console or do a "Rescue".
Things would be simple if there was only one kind of CD for the operating system, which accepted any valid license key (assuming you knew it!). At least then I could buy one on e-Bay or make a copy (must be legal to own the CD if I have the paid-for OS on a machine) for re-installation as and when required.
Mind you, I shouldn't whinge. Thank you to HP and Dell for reacting to consumer demand in a far better manner than MS have.
First, I agree with you 100% (more if possible) on congratulations to Dell, and any others, for reacting to consumer demand (outrage?) and continuing to offer XP.
It seems odd that you received a machine which was preloaded with something you couldn't restore. I know that Dell has recently been changing over to the "hidden partition" method of recovery, instead of shipping media. Is it possible that you got the system preloaded with XP, and the XP "recovery" is on the hard disk, and then they included the Vista recovery DVDs because that wasn't what was preloaded?
Last, yes, I fully agree, the "recovery" procedures which don't give you any options other than "wipe the disk and restore to factory initial" are very irritating. The people who design and distribute those things should be forced to use them, in emergency situations, a few times, and they would learn how much better it is to have some less drastic options.
The problem I needed to recover from was a hard drive failure. Kind of difficult to use a recovery partition in a damaged hard drive to recover to a healthy new one! Doubly so when the PC you've got only has a single SATA connector so you can't put a second drive in internally. Happy happy joy joy for the external drive and screwdriver I had to hand...
Are you serious thats crazy, I take it there is more than one IDE otherwise that motherboard is serious rubbish. Probably another one of Dells cost cutting procedures. This is my take on how that desicion came about.
MB Supplier: "How many SATA connectors would you like"
Dell: "We'll just have the one SATA if its cheaper"
MB S: "Are you sure what if your customers want to upgrade"
Dell: "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, anyway it will probbably break in a year and the spec it has now should be addequate until then.
With the recovery partition on the HDD and no Media.
It is good from a Techie point of view dealing with a customer who has usually lost the disks. But bad with HDD failure. In an ideal world we'd all take an Image of our new machines, but who does that seriosly nobody does.
Dell XP recovery disks how ever are Generic it is just the driver disks that are model specific. So if you have an old Dell recovery disk you should be able to use that it will know through the hardware that it is a Dell and wont bother you for a Product Key. Or if you know someone who has a Recovery disc Burn a copy.
It's one of those compact desktop things. There is only physical room in the box for the laptop-style DVD drive and one hard drive. In fairness, putting another SATA port on the board would be pointless.
If I was upgrading to another hard drive, I'd do what I ended up doing - plug one in internally and the other via a USB adaptor. Boot off a CD to mirror the drives and resize the partitions on reboot.
And I'm sure a generic Dell CD would have been fine... if I had one at all! I'm in France and the people in charge of purchasing are in the UK. They have a habit of removing all the CDs and so forth before they ship the kit out to us. Not very useful...
Yes, the situation you are in is the biggest weak point of the "recovery in a disk partition" approach. A somewhat lesser problem is the fact that many users don't even realize that the recovery media is there, and so when they need it they end up running all over looking for it, or just going out and buying something. On the other side of the coin, as Chris pointed out, when they do ship recovery CD/DVD media, it all too often gets lost, misplaced, or simply forgotten.
Most of the companies who ship systems this way provide some sort of means of producing recovery CD/DVD medai from the disk image. That could be a blessing for someone in your position, where others in the "supply chain" see fit to remove any media shipped with the computer. But again, how many users actually make the effort to create such media? Very few, I would say.
There are faults with both systems, for sure. If you supply software for creating media then you're relying on the customer to purchase blank media and make them. In fact, the first ever PC we bought (OK, my dad bought for me going to uni) came with Windows 3.1 installed... and a program to run to create the install discs. All 16 of them. Of course, we didn't, the system fell over and my dad had to scrounge a new set off someone in work for the weekend.
My laptop came with software to backup the install, but once you have the software on the system it often weighs in at significantly more than a CD's worth of data. Once I'd configured my Acer and ran the backup, it was 4 CDs (couldn't get a DVD burner installed). Not ideal for frequent backups and very time-consuming although it did offer a way of recovering a system to a fully configured environment, not just fresh out of the box. Everything off the C-drive was dumped to disc.
A genuine OS CD is great, though. Anyone can get hold of a freeware disc imaging program that'll dump to CD/DVD. But you need an OS CD for recovery, simple repairs and so on. As such, I think they're invaluable - and I'd have thought cost next to nothing for the manufacturer to include.
My current laptop solution - due to the low price of external HDDs now - is to mirror the entire hard drive every couple of weeks to a similarly-specced external disc via USB. The software I'm using is freeware, works a treat and takes less than an hour (unattended) to mirror 120Mb. Worst case if the internal drive collapses entirely, I just have to swap the drives over - 10 minutes' work at most.