December 15, 2008 by James Oliver
It’s a tale as old as the personal computer. Windows come up with a new operating system, they release it with a huge fanfare, then develop the next one. When that one comes out they quietly phase out the old one. Simple. Well, not that simple, not this time anyway. It appears that XP, the OS before Vista, is refusing to die a quiet death.
Microsoft’s final date for people to downgrade from Vista to XP has been extended twice now (it stands at the 31st of July next year), as people continue to decide to stick with the system they know rather than trying to learn Vista. on top of this, Dell have announced that, for a charge of $150 dollars, they are to offer systems with XP installed instead of Vista.
The percentage of PCs with XP installed stands at 66%. A figure that’s very high, especially considering that Vista is not a new system.
Microsoft are thought to be reliant on Windows 7 to solve this problem for them, so much so that many industry analysts are predicting a 2009 release – earlier than the planned date of January 2010. However, it is thought that they will need to do a better job of marketing it than they did with Vista, maybe they could call Apple for some advice.
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