NEC helps businesses downgrade to XP
February 4th, 2008 at 9:47 pm by AndyNEC will effectively continue to offer Windows XP to customers after Microsoft’s sales cut-off in the summer, thanks to new “downgrade” software. Many business customers are reluctant to upgrade to Vista because of training costs and compatibility issues, but Microsoft has announced that it will stop selling XP by the end of June 2008. NEC’s FlexLoad uses Microsoft’s downgrade option to revert from Vista to XP, without the need to purchase any additional licenses.
“It means that we can provide customers with XP after the cut-off date in summer. It’s about giving customers what they want. This summer’s deadline will accelerate the uptake of Vista, but a lot of companies want to remain using XP,” says David Newbould of NEC.
Many manufacturers have taken advantage of Microsoft’s downgrade option and bundled XP restoration discs with new machines, but FlexLoad claims to automate and speed-up the task.
The tool allows administrators “without any specific technical skills” to change from a Vista installation to XP within 15 minutes, claims NEC.
“It’s standard on notebooks that we’re shipping now, but on desktops it’s an option,” says Newbould.
To buy the product alone costs just £10, while it’s a £7 option on new desktop sales.
It’s all the rage to be disparaging about Microsoft and Vista at the moment, so I’ll try and keep this as neutral as possible. From Microsoft’s point of view it’s obviously a good idea for them to be heavily pushing Vista, however it frustrates me (as I’m sure it does a lot of other users) when companies dictate your software usage. Why should you have to take such a roundabout method just to get a new PC with XP instead of Vista? Yes, XP is an 8 year old product, but in my experience, it still copes with whatever I throw at it (although that’s mostly due to the 3rd party software being able to take full advantage of XP’s capability)
Granted to the average user, Vista is appealing and (relatively) easy to use, not least because of the flashy effects and restrictive interface, but why should one market segment dictate over the rest?
I was planning on waiting for Vista SP1 before retiring XP from my main rig, however after some poor experiences on other machines, and the announcement that Vista SP1 is being pushed to mid March due to driver bugs, it makes me examine my motives for upgrading, and coming to the conclusion that I don’t actually want to upgrade - I’ll stick to XP thank you very much.