Windows XP cutoff date inches closer
If you've been paying attention to Microsoft support deadlines lately, you'll know that an effective moratorium on Windows XP sales will go into effect on June 30th of this year. After that date, OEMs will be barred from selling copies of Windows XP, except under specific circumstances. For example, OEMs may still sell Windows XP Professional licenses for orders of 25 or more PCs but only if those PCs come with a Windows Vista Business or Ultimate license as well. Essentially, the customer will be allowed to "downgrade" by using the Vista license for the XP installation. As for enterprise volume licenses, those will also include "downgrade rights," so while Microsoft will stop selling XP licenses, a Vista Business or Ultimate volume license can still be used to activate XP installs, provided you supply your own XP installation materials.
Technically, Microsoft is not cutting off support for Windows XP until April 14, 2009 (and will extend support until 2014 for some editions). Still, the coming OEM sales "cutoff" certainly won't make life easy for IT departments, the vast majority of which still run Windows XP. While those who purchase PCs and licenses in bulk won't have much of a problem, small businesses who are used to buying single PCs and licenses might be forced into adopting Vista. Does your business have a plan in place for dealing with the looming deadlines? Let us know in the comments.
For more on the cutoff:
- see this InformationWeek article
Comments (5) | Post a comment
Comments
By Siegfried Duray-Bito | Posted 5:09pm | January 29, 2008
It's still not clear to my why I should upgrade when my apps are increasingly only on the Net and upgrading to a 1 meg machine just to run Vista is just throwing money out the window.
By Hate Vista - How about Ubuntu? | Posted 11:22pm | January 29, 2008
I actually made the mistake of buying Vista to upgrade my machine. I spent over 40 hours trying to get all the drivers in place. FINALLY - I got it working. Barely. I tried to change to a USB keyboard without success. After a while, I started getting the dreaded blackscreens upon bootup... and they became more and more frequent. (Seems a lot of people had this issue looking on the web). So I finally had to go BACK to Win XP. I am very reticent to try again after that experience. Furthermore, we have one Vista laptop at our work (with 20 computers). Its USB drive does not work (driver problem - since it works fine for iPods! But no Flash drive can load!!), so we can only share files with the laptop by emailing it to ourselves. We have 6 people using Ubuntu right now, and they are mostly happy with it. While there are still compatibility issues with Microsoft programs - we are using Google docs more and more, and this works fine on ANY machine. So... is everyone else doing this, too? As we move all of our files to the web - actually having a Microsoft computer is less important. Vista is accelerating this move for us, and fortunately there is Ubuntu that is ready for us.
By Anonymous | Posted 3:04am | January 30, 2008
Deadline June 14,2009 may affect some businesses, and if serious, all or some users will migrate permanently to other databases as lycos, and others which do work well.,different, and even better.
By Rex Allen | Posted 1:45pm | April 28, 2008
If I need to upgrade to a new machine I will go with either a MAC or load in LINUX or some other software. I refuse to use VISTA, because of the problems. Just like M.E. (Millenium Edition) VISTA will be useless. Most M.E. users went to Windows 2000 because of all the problems with M.E. Also what about Digital Rights Management? Do they think they own all the computers in existance?
By netwind | Posted 10:17am | May 1, 2008
I have refused to install Vista on my PCs after having experimented with 3 different installation. A subpar operating system in my opinion.