Understanding the Vista to XP downgrade.

First and foremost we strongly recommend against buying a computer with Microsoft Vista. It is our experience that the average user will be unhappy at best and totally frustrated at worst. That is if Vista will actually work with their existing hardware and software. Keep in mind if you buy a system with Vista, and decide to install XP, most computer vendors will not provide you with software tech support, in some cases the systems will not have XP drivers available. The best bet is to buy a computer with Xp. It is the most stable and compatible windows system and will be available and supported for a long time.

That said, If you purchase a new desktop or laptop computer preloaded with Microsoft Vista and decide that you wish to go back to XP you have only a couple options and in most cases they are not free.

There are 3 different versions of Vista; Home, Business and Ultimate.

If you bought Vista Business or Ultimate and decided you don’t like it or it isn’t compatible Microsoft is offering an option where if a friend of yours has a key for XP Pro that has already been used. . they will allow that key to be activated again in order to let you install it on your computer in place of Vista. You must not have activated the copy of Vista that you have, and there is confusion over whether you lose the rights to that Vista license in the future.

Now, if you are like the millions of regular people and small businesses that bought a Vista computer with “Vista Home,” according to Microsoft you are stuck with it. They only offer the suggestion that you spend $189 for a retail copy of XP Home and then install the software yourself.

Vista is not user friendly, it makes simple tasks take longer, it has lots of networking and compatibility bugs and is a nightmare to support. Yet if you are going to buy a new computer, and you don’t buy an XP system, you need to be prepared to use Vista or pay the “Microsoft tax” to go back to XP. There are a lot of retailers like TigerDirect and Dell that make it easy to buy XP systems.

You can find copies of XP home for less than the $189 retail price. Locally and online TigerDirect and Intrex sell XP Home for around $100. If you planning on using this computer in a domain or client server type setup you will need XP Pro that runs about $140. Regularly $299. (Best Buy also sells an XP home upgrade that will work for $100.) Because Xp activates you must have a license for Xp that is new, or has not been used a lot. It is possible to buy one copy of XP Home and use the license to downgrade 2 or 3 computer. This is technically possible though against the terms of the licensing agreement.

In most cases it will take about 2 to 3 hours to wipe Vista off of the system and install XP. This includes installing drivers for all of the hardware and depending upon the manufacturer the device drivers can be hard to find. Some companies don’t have the XP drivers on their support site and you have to track down the original hardware company to find the drivers.

As you might imagine we have been inundated with requests for Vista downgrades and have tried our best to accommodate everyone, however in order to do this we need to institute a fixed fee for downgrading Vista to XP.

The cost to downgrade a Vista system is $200 labor plus the cost of the operating system. XP Home would be $300 for example. If you provide your own usable XP home license then you do not need to pay for the license. If you have an old computer that came with XP home (or pro) in some cases that license can be reused.

In the long run the downgrade to XP is worth it. You will have less problems, more compatibility and more security long term if you go that route now. In fact Microsoft support for XP will run through at least 2014 and by that time there will be other options.

Many people have mixed feelings about whether the monopoly that Microsoft has over the desktop operating systems is good or bad or even fair. This is an example of what happens when a company interprets a monopoly to mean that they can abandon the best interests of the consumers in order to further the bottom line. Why Vista? Microsoft felt that a “new” operating system would boost sales and increase profits. When consultants like ourselves pointed out the technical problems that consumers would have Microsoft called those our “Opportunities to increase value to the customer.” In other words if the software stinks, it will make more work for the IT guys.

When Microsoft first launched Windows 95 back in 1995 the systems gave the buyer the option of picking the system that they wanted on their computer at first boot. They could choose at that time whether to use Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. The computer would then set itself up based on the customers choice. Microsoft could have easily implemented the same system in the first year of Vista systems but the flexibility of the consumers was not that important to one of the biggest companies on the planet.