Getting Free From Vista
Monday, 2008-August-18
A third of new PCs being downgraded to XP, says metrics researcher
According to Devil Mountain Software Inc., which operates a community-based testing network, nearly 35% of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP.
Given my own recent experience with Windows Vista, I can see why such a large chunk of buyers quickly UPgrade from Vista to XP. Personally, I finally completely wiped out Vista this weekend, replacing it with Ubuntu 8.04 AMD-64 desktop edition.
Actually, it happened this way: I was going to add Fedora 9 to the list of operating systems installed on the computer, so I burned Vista restore DVDs, deleted the restore partition, then proceeded to resize the existing Windows and Ubuntu partitions to make room for Fedora–from inside Windows. Bad move, because I wound up with an unbootable system. I could have let the Fedora installer try to sort things out, but I realized I wasn’t going to use the Vista installation again anyway, so I wiped it out. And if I decide to pass this laptop on to someone else, they can stick the Vista restore DVDs in and have the same miserable experience I did.
After the installation of Fedora, I went to do updates, but was unable to reach the Fedora update servers from Friday evening to Sunday, when I decided to blow away F9 during the Ubuntu (re-)installation. So, in a multi-step process, my HP Vista laptop became the HP Ubuntu laptop that I should have been able to get from the retail location where I bought the computer.
Last year, Devil Mountain benchmarked Vista and XP performance using other performance-testing tools and concluded that XP was much faster. [Devil Mountain Software CTO Craig] Barth said things haven’t changed since then. “Everything I’ve seen clearly shows me that Vista is an OS that should never have left the barn,” he noted.
Auditioning a supplier for pre-installed Linux computers? Let us know how it turns out for you. Do you know a site which keeps a reasonably up-to-date and reasonably complete list? I’m not talking about buying a Windows computer and installing Linux over it–I mean offering computers powered by GNU + Linux and completely free of the Windows tax.
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