Over the weekend, I helped a friend of mine buy a new laptop. What was amazing was we actually went into a retail store, found the model she was most comfortable with and was in stock. We actually left the store with it under our possession.
What wasn’t amazing was how hard it was to purchase it, and how much Internet research I needed to do to enable this fabulous shopping experience.
You see, my friend wanted to stick with Windows XP. And the moral of my story, which I will provide up front, is that if you want XP on your future laptops, you better buy it now because it is only going to get more difficult.
According to Microsoft’s own Web site, XP Pro will no longer be available in the retail channel after July 1. Although OEMs and system builders will have until Feb 1, 2009.
There is an exception — for the immediate future the XP Home version will be available for ultra-small PCs, but these are probably not the PCs that you want to outfit your corporate fleet with.
Before heading to the Office Depot that is literally a block from my house, I spent some time looking over the major PC vendors’ Web sites and seeing what they had. Here is where the story turns ugly. My friend wanted to spend less than $1,000, have a 15.4-inch screen, and a keyboard that was solid enough for a demanding typist. That seemed easy to satisfy, until I started looking around.
None of the major PC vendors make it easy for you to buy a pre-configured XP laptop. They all “recommend Windows Vista” and hide their XP models several menu layers down or just don’t tell you where to find them. The two best vendors for XP are Lenovo and HP – possibly because they have standardized on XP for their own employees, possibly because they understand that this market segment isn’t going away as fast as Microsoft would like. HP sells actually two different versions of XP Pro – one is called a “business downgrade” that sounds ominous, the other is just the standard XP Pro. They cost the same, and they have fairly wide support for XP Pro across their laptop line. Lenovo has equally wide support. Both sites make it easy to figure out which laptops can be configured with XP Pro pre-installed, even if you can’t sort by operating system directly.
The two worst vendors are Sony and Gateway. I couldn’t find any XP models on either site, and Sony makes it almost impossible to determine what operating system is running on its machine until you get into the details on each individual model. Toshiba’s Web site isn’t much better.
I had better results going to Office Depot’s Web site, which was fortunate because as I said the store is very close by. There you can quickly search on XP Pro and find a dozen models from several different vendors, including Sony and Toshiba, which come with this operating system. It is ironic and cruel that you have to go to a retail vendor’s site to find the details about a product that you can’t get on the actual vendor’s site. This should be a lesson for those of you designing Web sites, but I will leave that for another column and another day.
In fact, the major PC retailers have done a much better job at finding XP from their home pages – often a few mouse clicks is all that it takes to narrow the field. BestBuy.com and CDW.com both will show you which models come with XP: in CDW’s case, they had nine results but only two Toshibas were in stock. (Best Buy’s business site has more than 100 listings for XP models today.)
So off we went to Office Depot. Amazingly, the Lenovo model they had on display was the sole laptop running XP, and it was one that my friend liked. We had to deal with a salesperson, who made several mistakes and tried to get us to purchase the extended warranty, but we left the store with product in hand.
Microsoft is making a mistake discontinuing XP to retail and corporate customers. There are many people that aren’t enamored with Vista, and I have heard from many corporate IT managers that are going slowly on its adoption. Buying a laptop is more of an issue, because many vendors are making laptops that have network cards and other gear that doesn’t have XP drivers. If you have plans for major XP laptop purchases this year, spend the money now while you still have a choice.
(This column also appeared today in Baseline magazine.)
Bill Frezza says:
I bought Jacky a Vista laptop last year, which she uses occasionally.
This weekend I turned it on after perhaps two weeks of non-use and it
took TWO HOURS to boot up. I had no control over the machine whatever as
Microsoft spent the whole time doing updates, some of which failed and
had to be re-tried, with the machine demanding that I do multiple
reboots.
The truth is, you cannot buy a Vista machine of your own. You can only
time-share it with Microsoft.
When I buy software I want to buy software, not sign up for a
lifetime relationship. I am sick and tired of competing with dozens of
vendors clamoring to demand primary access to my PC every time I boot up
so they can fix their buggy products or upsell me additional items I do
not want and did not ask for.
Bah.
I got pointed to this post from Michael Horowitz’s blog, who also wrote about this subject today. He asked for some input from system builders in regards to who would be able to continue getting XP licenses, so I figured I’d post my response him here as well.
HP and Dell, being OEM’s, have what I can only describe as “custom” relationships with Microsoft. However they have themselves tangled up dictates that they have to move their systems to Vista. And honestly, that’s probably fine for the majority of the mainstream/consumer market that those companies are dealing with. In the Channel, XP will continue to be available into 2009, so what I think that means is that there still will be some pretty easy ways for the layman to get their hands on copies of XP. When product moves through the Channel, that means it’s basically freely available to anyone. Yes, it’s supposed to be sold to system builders, but it doesn’t typically happen that way. Even now Microsoft has no problems with retail shops selling OEM copies of either OS to the general public. I think those same copies will continue to be sold — they’ll just be discontinuing RETAIL BOXES – which were frankly overpriced anyhow — and making agreements with their OEM’s to stop integrating XP.
Strom,
Thanks for your post. I think many of us share some of these frustrations when doing online research prior to making an in-store purchase.
Next time I’d like to suggest trying PCConnection.com. We carry over 100,000 products and offer some extended search capabilities, enabling you to browse based on multiple configurations including OS. We’re also currently running a free shipping promotion on all purchases over $99 through 4/30/08.
I did a search earlier today and found over 600 results for Windows XP Pro notebooks, many of which are in stock. Using our search filtering, you can also refine your results by additional criteria such as Manufacturer, List Price, and Display size to get closer to the machine you’re looking for.
Here’s a link to our search, which I hope you find helpful in the future. Best of luck to your friend with your new machine…it sounds like she was very lucky she had you around to do the research that you did!
http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Search.htm?CatId=204071&id=+2147483116&Sort=Most+Popular&DefSort=Y&Term=
Regards,
Seth Brady
PCConnection.com
I ran into this several years ago when I did not want to use XP SP1
(pre-Vista), and we had a home building app that was still a legacy DOS base
with a Windows front end. It caused nasty issues on XP systems.
I have a System Integrator who did a lot of our configuring for us, and he
told me that when you buy any version of MS OS, you have a liscense for any
of the previous OS as well. So, buy XP, and you have lisc for everything
back to Win 3.0.
We had him reformat the drive, and then install a fresh copy of Win 2000 on
all of the new Dell Systems that we purchased. This was from 2002 to 2007.
They ran great. Since XP SP2 came out, we have gradually moved to XP. The
system that I am typing this on is still a WIN2000, but it’s going to get
upgraded this weekend (along with some yard work)to XP. A number of the
Windows aps we also use are no longer being supported in WIN2000.
Ed Borden, the Director of Business Development at Puget Systems, a high-end custom systems builder, thinks that you have more time before you have to panic, in his blog entry here:
http://www.edbordenblog.com/2008/04/debunking-windows-xp-availability.html
But then, he talks about running XP as “ride a sinking ship down to the last minute” so consider that.