Windows XP Just Won’t Die!

Ok, so if you are up to date on the current technology news and what all Microsoft has been up to with XP and Vista, you should have a good idea about how they are trying to phase out XP and get more users using Windows Vista in its place. With Vista not having such a smooth launch it left a good number of Windows users wanting to stick to XP because basically “it just worked”. Vista added a much of stuff, didn’t work as well with old badly written programs (not really Microsoft’s fault) and things that just didn’t go as planned for the new operating system. A big factor was also the big computer companies such as Dell and HP were putting Vista on their machines that had hardware in them that wasn’t really designed for Vista and would cause them to not run as nice on the operating system as it should. So this only added to the growing list of problems Microsoft was having to face while trying to push the popularity of Vista.

One of the things Mircosoft has started doing is making claims about how they are not going to be supporting XP after a certain date, or you won’t be able to buy copies of XP anymore at all. Which is partly true now because it is really hard to get copies of XP still without having to buy a copy of Vista and use the downgrade rights. Now it seems that Microsoft has announced that after the month of January of 2009, you won’t even be able to use the downgrade rights of Vista to install XP on your machine and activate it. At the computer store I work at now, we get tons of requests for XP still and now basically all we can do is tell the customers that they need to get a copy of Vista to use the downgrade rights. Which just goes to prove that there is still a high demand for XP out there. Plus even though you won’t be able to buy it much longer, the updates will still be out there for some time so its not gonna just die off as quickly as they are hoping it seems still.

One thing I have noticed which is sort of a flaw in the Vista downgrade rights is the fact that when you are downgrading from Vista to install XP you can use any serial to install XP with. And once you call for customer support at Mircosoft to activate it for you, once you tell them you are “using your Vista downgrade rights” they never ask you about which serial you are using or if it is installed on any other computers. Basically they think you already have bought a copy of Vista and just needed a serial to get through the install of XP with. So this means, you need a fresh activated copy of XP… just find a serial from anywhere of XP Pro and call to activate it with “Vista downgrade rights” and you will be good to go it seems. While this isn’t really the honest way to go about it… I am sure it is being exploited and will be a problem until they can figure out a better way to handle those “downgrades” from Vista to XP.