Vista to XP: The world's most popular downgrade

One year after Microsoft Windows Vista hit the market, public response to it has been underwhelming. True, most buyers of new Windows-based home computers get Vista pre-installed by default; but that's not exactly the same as beating down the door for Vista's glitz.

Meanwhile, many techies, IT departments, and just plain home users are either holding off upgrading or actually converting back from Vista to XP, thereby introducing a backward-looking term into the forward-looking world of technology: downgrading. At the tech forums on Microsoft's Web site, for example, you'll find a hefty number of posts dedicated to doing just that.

With retail sales of XP now scheduled to end by June 30, a movement to save Windows XP has formed. At SaveXP.com, created by the IT publication Infoworld, more than 75,000 people (as of early February) have signed a petition to Microsoft demanding that Windows XP be kept available indefinitely.

Here are kinds of Vista gripes cited by people arguing to save XP:

• If it ain't broke don't fix it (i.e. XP works just fine for many people)
• Software and hardware incompatibilities
• Vista's overly intrusive and disruptive User Account Control feature
• Increased crashing of Internet Explorer
• The learning curve that comes when switching to a new interface
• System slowdowns, especially during boot-up

Microsoft is aware of these complaints and has said that fixes to some Vista problems will be available in March, via a service pack upgrade known as Vista SP1. Before rejecting Vista (if you don't need to make a decision immediately), wait until SP1 is out for a few weeks to see if it has addressed Vista's biggest problems.

If, however, you find yourself longing to travel back to the "good old days" of XP, it's still possible to buy Windows XP in the box from a number of stores. You can also pick up brand-new computer systems loaded with XP. But time is running out. (Although retail sales of XP cease on June 30, technical support will continue until March 2009).

You may also be able to find some Vista systems with an XP downgrade included in the box. Sony, for example, sells its VAIO SZ600 series (soon to be replaced with the SZ700 series) of laptops with an XP downgrade disc. XP downgrade rights are available only with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; these rights give you the option to downgrade to XP Professional, XP Professional x64, or XP Tablet PC for free.

Here's the lowdown on where you can find XP until June.

If you're buying a new computer, try this sampling of notebooks that come with Windows XP (you'll probably need to specifically ask for XP to avoid getting Vista by default):

• Compaq Presario V6700TX
• Dell Inspiron 1501
• Dell Inspiron 1520
• Dell XPS M1730
• Lenovo 3000 N Series and V Series
• Sony VAIO SZ
• Some Toshiba Satellite A-200 models

For desktops, try:

• Dell Inspiron 530s
• Dell Inspiron 530
• Dell XPS 210
• eMachines W3644
• Lenovo 3000 J Series

If you already own a computer with Vista on it and want to go back to XP, you can pick up a copy of Windows XP at Amazon.com, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA and Staples, among other retailers. Watch out though, because your Vista computer might not have XP drivers available for an essential function like the graphics chip; check the manufacturer's site first.

—Donna Tapellini

Comments

[Lewis Salem]

See. The people have spoken. I've been a web developer for 10 years and I've never had to deal with so many OS issues. Microsoft is so arrogant not to admit that Vista is a bloated. Everything is slow unless you have 4 gigs memory. What a mess. They must do something because the will loose ground in the cheap laptop realm where linux has a foothold.

[Mahipal]

Hello,

I had installed windows vista on my XP laptop and I want to go back to XP, but I am not able to do so. Please give me direcctions to do so.

Thank you

[Steven]

I brought the HP tx2000 with vista installed. Only used within week and i downgraded from vista to xp. I am telling you, once xp installed this vista-supp orted computer. It speed up XP like crazy! It does feel much better beacuse I am not wasting to buy visita ultimate for 400$ after called Microsoft company and they said this window cannot interfering any type of C++ program or communication with my robotics (I am programmer and developer for robotics) and has to upgrade to MS Ultimate. What kind of business they are? The final word i told them i said "Oh ha! forget it, im sticks with XP and MAC" then hung up and downgraded to xp. It works as well.

Bill gate have billion dollar in his butt and why don't they just begin flexible with his idea of operation system instead of pressure the customers to the newer version of operation system? All i know my mother just gave up with computer to Mac because she wanted to sticks with the window 98 (that's right it's oldest version of OS) due no technical support available for her, i had to fix these bugs for her. Sad news for Microsoft, entire of my family have been switched to the MAC. I am only one in my family who is using both.

[Scott M]

Personally, I run a system with both XP and Vista installed. Dual booting I have to say that my primary OS is still XP. That isn't to say that I don't think Vista gets a bad rap. It does.

Then again, I also have a Mac, and for so many reasons I sort of view Vista as a poor clone of Mac OSX, which is a great OS.

Having said that about Mac OS, as someone who works in the video game industry, and does a tremendous amount of gaming on my PC, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Mac is still a very poor choice if you are going to be doing any gaming.

That and the increased costs from not being able to run OSX easily on a non-Apple machine, means that PCs are still going to be the primary platform for most entertainment software development.

[techwalker]

I have been using Vista on a home built desktop for over a year now and I have to say Vista rocks! I've had 0 issues with it and after SP1 it only got better. I saw that Extreme Tech recently compared XP SP3 with a identically speced Vista SP1 machine. The Vista machine was up to 16% faster running the benchmarks they used. I recently bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad running XP Pro that had the dreaded "Vista Capable" logo. Being curious I installed Vista Ultimate on it as well as Ubuntu 8.04. Vista works every bit as well as XP on this machine as does Ubuntu.
Vista has several features which I hate to do without. Primarily the start search which is vastly superior to any third party of desktop search I've used. I've also been impressed with the Backup and Restore Application native to Vista. Having done a complete restore from it, I feel comfortable relying on it for backing up my systems. And I don't think anyone will deny that Vista is more secure than XP, although some people may complain about the UAC it clearly will help a user be more secure than XP. It really isn't much more of a hassle than the administrative control found in Mac OSX or Linux.
I'm not saying Vista is perfect, but the vast majority of performance related issues were with early drivers. Video drivers, especially those from Nvidia were the worst culprits and have been largely resolved.
Just thought I'd put in my 2 cents, since there is a lot of misinformation about Vista out there.

[cbilly]

I gave up and bought a macbook pro with leopard osx in it....after only a week of learning it I will never ever go back to a PC.

All the frustration of making the switch was offset by all the fun features on the mac.

Almost every program I ran on my PC is now running on my mac.....but twice as nice.... I even have MS word and MSN messenger and on a partitioned hard drive I have microsoft xp just in case (hardly use it)

Note.... xp works better on my mac than it ever did on my PC.

[Rajasekaran]

Recently i purchased new hp pavilion laptop with pre installed vista .When i am installing a new application softwares,it will allways shows the ERROR ,and performance also SLOW when campare to XP ,so i am very much disappointed with VISTA OS .

now try to UGRADE vista TO XP ,but again i am facin very big problem because HP NOT SUPPORT for xp drives for the pre installed vista laptops .

Last one week i am wasted to get the drive for the XP but yet i get sound drive for XP.

I AM REQUESTED ALL FRIENDS. IF DECIDE BUY A LAPTOP ,PLEASE U GO FOR THE xp SUPORRTED BRANDED LAPTOP ,BECAUSE I WAS WASTED MY MONEY

[V]

I wanted to purchase a Dell 1525 but with XP not Vista. They don't give you an option for XP, so I contacted customer service and they told me I had to choose the 1520 because "all parts of the 1525 are Vista Patterned." At the time I had been planning to downgrade the system to XP, but after reading this blog, have decided not to buy the 1525... it's just too much trouble and I am adamant about not using Vista.

[Cynthia]

Just bought a Toshiba with preinstalled Vista... been to Toshiba for warranty service three times. Each time comes back with note saying software programs I am using are not compatible with Vist and I should buy programs that are ony compatible with Vista. I recently purchased a software program at $4000 previous this computer and told that it would be compatible with VISTA. I requestesd that Toshiba put XP on my computer since I was misinformed and they admitted that Vista has problems. They told me they cannot because they had a dealwith Microsoft to install Vista and the computer would not support XP???? What kind of a scam is this? Agreeing with the fact this is Microsofts way of getting people to buy more of there products hence new software programs! The government Consumer services should step in here. No wonder Gates is a Millionare taking advantage of people.

[mark schneider]

Many early problems with Vista had to do with drivers and file transfer speeds. The drivers are much better and SP 1 fixed the file transfer speed. Vista is far more secure than XP sorry that's not debatable. Some of the sensational so called journalism about Vista and DRM turned out to be total BS. Vista's DRM for high definition video content only works when you play a HD or Blu-ray DVD. Macs with Leopard won't play HD or Blu-Ray movies, Vista can.
XP came out in October 2002 you can run it on a 400mhz P3 processor with 128MBs of ram. Guess what, Vista needs more resources, so what. Many of the complaints I read here probably don't have anything to do with Vista. I've got 4 machines at home with Vista, one machine a Lenovo Thinkpad has the dreaded Vista capable logo, I wasn't sure after everything I read that Vista would work, so I set up a dual boot XP and Vista and after SP1 Vista boots to log in screen 3 seconds faster than XP, (38 to 41). Vista needs at least 2GB of ram that did cost $40, other than that the machine works great.

[Alejo colombia]

i did a tutorial about how to downgrade from vista to xp on vaio laptops, here there are the links:

part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a21YylK6hac

part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoKyAyLGOXM

gracias

[Tyler]

Why even bother the cumbersome upgrade to Vista? Windows 7 is going to be out in 2-3 years...

Among the list of gripes - the author didn't include the reasons behind why Vista is such a poor performer. Which is largely do to its own system integrity checks and measures to curb piracy of the OS as well as many types of multimedia files.

The focus of Vista is protecting it's bottom line and making sure it's multimedia partners also get paid and it really shows in the end result.

Tip to Microsoft - next time you want to sell an End-User an OS for them? You better design it for them and learn from this lesson.

Transferring files over a network in Vista takes 10-12 times as long using the exact same hardware in XP. Unacceptable.

[Denise]

I bought a Toshiba Satellite A205 last April which uses Vista. For the first few months everything was aok - no problems. Well that hasn't been the case lately. Numerous blue screen and black screen shut downs. Internet explorer shutting down without any warning. I have had to unplug the power supply before returning from sleep mode to avoid the black screens. Then if I don't plug the power supply back in it shuts down with no warning in about 15 min. even while the battery is full.
When it comes back from the blue screen and you check the details of the shutdown and then look for solutions there are no solutions available.
I am seriously considering a mac at this point.

[Rick Pugh]

It's all well & good to say that XP is currently still on the shelves to purchase, so that folks can still buy it if they're not happy with Vista. But when the price of XP Pro Upgrade version went from $89.95 to $198.95 within a month of Vista's release, you can't convince me that M-$oft aren't manipulating the market to force a larger market up-take of Vista. As well, many company and military systems are not about to introduce Vista into their locked down and classified systems, simply on M-$oft's say-so.

XP is proven, and readily supported by 3rd-party vendors. Vista's benefits are over-rated. Why not let the people decide which they'd prefer, by having the prices of both OSs the same? I'd bet the people's choice would be XP, by far.

[Chetan Mehta]

All new Dell Vostro desktops and laptops as well as many of its inspiron & XPS desktops and laptops have an option to purchase with XP Home or XP Professional. All its business PC's and Laptops also have this option. I bought Vostro 1500 laptop with XP Pro in November and have not regretted the decision.

Even if you choose to buy XP Pro, make sure you buy enough memory and processor power to be able to upgrade to Vista in future (SP2 or later perhaps?).

[Dan]

Vista is trash,
Old machines run like crap after installing vista.

New machines we have bought (10 in all) run like crap. Shutdowns, simple things like typing vista can not keep up with. We have seen major performance improvement on every machine after going back to XP on the new machines!

Now drives have been a reap pain to get, but the system can often be made to work using generic drivers for the hardware in question.

I'm not sure whats going on industry wide here, but I think we are being screwed here. New hardware makers suddenly do not offer xp driver? WTF!! Thats has never happened before, heck I can still get 98 drivers for most hardware.. Why all the sudden are we being forced into xp in every direction. Even software makers are starting to make vista only software, and I must say that they also preform poorly over the xp version. It has been proven that vista only games will run better on xp, yet Micro$oft said it cant be done; a registry setting was changed and directX 10 forcefully installed on xp, works like a charm.

There is ZERO real improvement in vista. REALLY! What exactly do you do that warrants vista? Its wasteful! I have a 1 Mega byte floppy operating system that can browse the web and check email and all the other basics which runs faster on a 400 mhz machine than vista on a 2.8 Ghz duel core 800 mhz buss computer!!!!! Hmmm makes you think, "don't it!"

[Ted]

You can down grade or up grade whichever way you want to look at it from Vista to Xp most of the time. As some in here have said make sure to check your pc's manufacture for drivers for xp that will work with your machine. Something to watch out for that alot have run into is sata hard drives Xp installs have no drivers for them and most machines that have sata have no floppey drive so you have to do a slip stream I've used nLite a great free program to copy inject the needed drivers and even put spw and sp3 update all on the same xp install create a burnalbe ISO and make a new install disk. Hope this helps.

[Jared]

Bought a new Dell Inspiron 1720 a couple of weeks ago. I've heard all the horror stories about Vista but I figured since this is my laptop mainly for school, I would go ahead and get it since the future (for most people) is Vista, not XP and I plan to have this computer for a long time. Anyway, I have been pleasantly surprised. It looks and works great, I have no issues with vista whatsoever. Works great with my home network, security software, Canon printer etc. It makes me wonder if all the negative hype really is warranted. I would say, don't upgrade to Vista with an older PC but if you are getting a new PC, I would go with Vista. Make sure you have at leat 2GB memory (I have 3GB on my laptop).

[Chris Lane]

I bought a compac presario from best buy for my family for christmas. it has been a downward spiral of program crashes, shut downs, not allowing adobe reader to open my sons mps player owners manual, which we bought from best buy also doesn't work..... from the computer??????? im taking this piece of crap beack to them this weekend!!!!!!!!

[bob scott]

If you are going to suggest to people that they go out and buy XP to put on a Vista computer you should be responsible enough to tell them exactly what is involved. To say that "drivers might not be available" is a severe understatement.

You should give people step by step instructions as to find out what drivers are needed and how they can obtain them.

Bob Scott

[GERALD E. BACHMAN]

PURCHASED A NEW COMPAC PRESARIO LAST WEEK, VERY DISSATISFIED WITH BEING FORCED TO BUY VISTA WITH IT. BRING BACK XP AND END THIS CON JOB!