Vista Backlash: Microsoft Quietly Lets Vista Users Revert to XP

Vista has been great for our business as customers are spurning packages with bundled Vista in favor of custom built machines with XP.

Not a consumer trend? That's baloney. I just ordered a new Dell laptop for my wife with XP. I didn't want to suffer through the degraded system performance of Vista, let alone all of the layers of the new security UI. I know many of my friends who've tried Vista are abandoning it. The problem is that many of these "Designed for Vista" systems only have drivers for Vista, you won't find XP drivers for the newer chipsets (the OEM's didn't bother developing them). So check with your MFG'er to determine if your machine can even support XP. Send the machine back if it doesn't.
Someone needs to check their research a little better to see the trends in consumers' feelings about Vista.

"Retail consumers are not requesting to go back to XP," Swenson says.
Retail consumers buy what's on the shelf, with whatever OS is loaded on the machine they purchase. To whom are they going to make the request? Best Buy, CostCo? Just because the is no data showing that consumers want to revert to XP, doesn't mean that consumers DON'T want to revert to XP. Or better yet, switch to a MAC, like I did.

I think all of this is nonsense. I have two new Vista machines. My Vista Business machine runs my HP 5150, 5650 Deskjet printers and my HP 3670 Scanjet with all of the bells and whistles.

No problems anywhere.

Chris Swenson from the NPD Group is woefully misinformed. There are plenty of users out there who don't want Vista. And why should they? It's bloated, buggy, unstable, requires twice the hardware specs of XP, isn't compatible with most of their existing apps (including ones from Microsoft), and runs slower than XP (especially if you enable all the eye candy).

Not to mention the fact that Microsoft keeps issuing critical updates that kill user's systems. One update deleted the Master Boot Record on many systems. Another invalidated the Windows Product Key some computers. They put out a Realtek audio chip driver that they wrote to use memory space reserved for the system32.dll. Their latest fiasco is an update that disables the Ethernet port.

It doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's STILL A PIG!

By the way, the XP Pro recovery discs from Lenovo cost $45 + $3.03 shipping and any local tax. I should know, I'm a Lenovo support tech, and I sell them every day.

I hope Gateway offers this deal. I'm a retail customer. I bought 2 Gateway Vista OS computers a few months ago. Vista is a joke! Networking Vista with XP is a nightmare, not to mention the UAC crap.

Ughhh...I love when I see articles like this about Vista. The reason why Microsoft is allowing this is simply because they know that company don't want to operate on multiple operating systems. Eventually, as with all Microsoft products, tech support will run out and the Enterprise license will require an upgrade, along with sotware assurance upgrades, so it's only a matter of time before everyone changes. Has nothing to do with abandonment, but I love the way the media puts their spin on it to create excitement.
-Melanie Gass

The "Not consumer driven" part of this article is totally not true. I work for a large pc service shop where we have a supply of XP just for down-grades. Just the last week we have done 4. All consumer driven. I expect that number to rise in the consumer market as Vista is just not liked.

Agree w/Jaswax and others. I work as an independent contractor, doing work for a few different companies; and between myself and ONE of the companies I do work for, we have completed about 20 reversions thus far, and all for one of two reasons:

1. "It's too confusing, I can't find anything!"
2. "I can't get my [insert periperal or software suite here] to work!"

I'm a fairly experienced computer user, and I deliberately picked a feature that I 'knew' would be easy to adjust in Vista, supposedly - icon size adjustment. I had my wife try - she gave up. I then tried, sure it would be easy....and FIFTEEN minutes later, I figured it out. (Sure I probably missed it once or twice - but that's sort of my point! It was NOT easy to find.)

I then had her try it on a Windows XP computer. Not knowing how to do it, it took her exactly 3 minutes to figure it out.

But hey...at least it LOOKS really nice...

I wouldn't trade my XP Pro OS for a Vista SuperPenultimate. The new OS is just an extension of the rampant commercialism that's destroying our country.

MS needs to remedy Vista's shortcomings before I will recommend anyone buy it. I'm advising customers to wait, if at all possible, for Vista SP1 to come out. Currently, it's just too slow, it's too buggy and it's UAC implementation, while commendable in theory, is an absolute farce in reality. They need to adopt the firewall paradigm- give choices whether or not to always, never, just for this time, allow/deny the execution of certain CLASSES of behavior.
Networking has becoming problematic. It's needlessly complex AND slow. I was fully prepared to jump into this release ... but I certainly don't use it on anything other than a test bed machine.

Someone needs to wake up out there! Consumers are having as many or just as many Vista problems as everyone else. I recently purchased a Dell laptop with Vista for my daughter to take to college. Now 5 weeks later, she still has no working PC. As mentioned previously an update destroyed her Master Boot Record and she sat for days with the "Black Screen of Death". Additionally we have purchased now 2 different printers claiming to be compatible with Vista and neither one are. She cannot print anywhere on campus and I like others am totally fed up.

Afer a recent visit this past weekend to the school, I met literally hundreds of other parents who cannot believe that the investment they made in new laptops resulted in their kids having no working computers. Do kids need anything else at college other than a functioning computer!

I will pursue this to the end to get back XP!

Only a matter of time now, my friends, before MS does an ME on Vista and pulls the plug. C'mon. EVERYONE knows Vista is crapola. INCLUDING MS. Home and Business customers ALL are unhappy with it. Why? Because: A. It's slower, B. It's more annoying. C. It's NOT more secure D. It requires MORE hardware E. It's NOT compatible with what users are using. And last, but NOT LEAST, it offer the user ZERO, NADA, NUNCA, ZIP, ZILCH practical benefit over XP. Just at IE 7 is garbage as is Office 2007. Why make it better if we can just force it down people's throats and make them believe it's better cuz it's new. It's the Apple effect

Retail customers are not requesting to go back to XP really, thats news to me..I just did that for a coworkers daughter who bought as brand new Dell with Vista instaled..It would basically refuse to print anymore after printing a couple of pages. After hours on the phone with Dell support who had her wipe the machine clean and reload Vista (problem stiil existed) the Dell tech told her that all new macinhes had problems at first. I loaded XP for her...end of story...

Retail customers are not requesting to go back to XP really, thats news to me..I just did that for a coworkers daughter who bought as brand new Dell with Vista instaled..It would basically refuse to print anymore after printing a couple of pages. After hours on the phone with Dell support who had her wipe the machine clean and reload Vista (problem stiil existed) the Dell tech told her that all new machines had problems at first. I loaded XP for her...end of story...

6 months ago I finished college with an AVCE in IT, then joined the citizens advice bureau in oldham as IT support,

I like to look into the history of computers, and how users beliefs change, what i see here is typical changeover words,

whenever a new OS or form of drive etc. is brought out people are quick to jump on its faults, vista is just the same,

vista came to us just like xp did and at first people are wary of the hype, and, just like xp when it first came out, vista as a lot of teething problems, but give it time, (i would give it till the 2nd service pack) and most of these would have been ironed out,

and the guy who said that it runs slower than the xp OS it is probably because you bought a PC that just manages to support the Vista Requirements,

I challlenge you to buy a PC that only just meets the requirements for an XP OS and I bet you get the same results,

at the end of the day if you invest more you get more.

"Teething problems"? Hardly. XP had "teething problems" in that it took a month or so for drivers to catch up, and for applications that were rendered incompatible to be recoded so they weren't... This took days, or in some cases, weeks.

XP64, in comparison, fell on its face. There are *still* no drivers for many hardware applications. You can *still* buy printers at Walmart that don't work on XP64.

The same is happening to Vista; hardware vendors are being slow to offer support, if they're even bothering to jump through the hoops to get certified, and major software vendors are dragging their feet as well. I think the problem is simply that *everyone* is waiting for the service packs that will make Vista stable... including the vendors. Hopefully, they're not waiting in vain.

Vista is not "teething", it's failing.

Retail Vista customer here. Dell laptop purchased here promptly went overseas to a missionary. After multiple problems, he wiped the drive clean and installed XP. He’s quite technical. Surprise! Many devices on the board are new, and don’t have XP drivers. I wonder how well these "recovery" CDs will work.
Second situation was granddaughter's HP which I bought as a retiree. After 6 weeks, 5 home visits by technicians, 2 Motherboard swaps and one complete box-swap--we finally got a running system which displayed all colors on the screen and drove the 2-year-old HP printer. Then the fun of migrating.
Again.
Extremely slow. File transfers XP-Vista are more than twice as slow over XP-XP. When things finally looked good I returned home 150 miles away. Vista had trashed her hundreds of hours of video camera files. She is a videographer. Turns out there is a bug in AVI_Write procedure which corrupts file headers. This is not a ‘’teething problem.’’ This is customer data corruption!

I think the amazing success of MAC is testimony to how consumers feel about Vista. How can Microsoft say that Customers need more time to transition? It's NOT the customers that need more time. I have a Brand new XPS 1330 that just shipped. I just checked the Dell Web site and there is NO support for XP on that. I am already thinking I need to Send It Back.

Vista turned me into a full time Linux user at home.
That's all I have to say about that.

I lead our I.T. Department and am using Vista on my Dell Latitude 630 laptop. I wish that Microsoft would have done some more work before releasing Vista. Examples: You cannot double-click the network icon in the toolbar to easily change the network settings, Exchange Administrator does not work on Vista, our HP 1100 Deskjet is incompatible with Vista, several times when I changed the bottom toolbar to two levels it reverts back to one, and finally the sidebar sometimes is no longer there on login. I have been sooooo tempted to revert back to XP. I trying not to think of Vista as a Windows ME (a stay-away OS). I am going to study for my Vista MCTS cert. Hopefully I will learn a trick or two that will make me happier with Vista.

IMHO, Microsoft has a few fatal flaws not only in it's business model of "who cares what the consumer wants they get what we give them and we'll force them to use it" but also in their technology model. As computers get more powerful and capable of doing more why does Microsoft feel the need to cause the operating system take more and more resources to do exactly the same thing, which is to be a platform to launch the software you use. I think this way of doing things is completely the wrong way. Shouldn't we want an os which leaves the majority of our resources for our programs (which is the real functionality of our computer) rather than taking up all the resources itself. No matter how pretty an os is if you can't do what you need to do with it it's nothing more than a pretty picture, nice to look at but ultimately useless. And Vista's really not that pretty, it's watered down bloated upCompiz/Beryl and has less functionality to boot.

Lsavagejt: "The new OS is just an extension of the rampant commercialism that's destroying our country."
This is so true. It's definitely a business world. Sadly, there normally exists a lack of quality coding or code integrity when you have to make money and meet deadlines. And one influence to this, apart from human greed, is the fact that MS is on the share market (right?), which means they have to make more money every year so their shares don't go down in price (right?).

What surprised me most about this thread is that most of you seem quite adept with technology and your comments on the problems you've had with Vista seem well founded in "fact".

I've been a technical support engineer for 25 years, from mass deployment of PC through to IBM mainframe servers. I've just this week "7th October, 2007" installed Vista. Applied all the updates.

2 Things.

1) The amount of background tasks running in Vista is disgusting. How the hell are you supposed to know what's going on as an end user.

2) Error log is full of the usual non-descriptive Microsoft errors, which when checked for further information using M$ online help show "Sorry no help on this. Search MSDN for further information".

Garbage. New Mac OS X Leopard is out soon.
Vista is a joke on the billions of PC users out there.

I'm tied to PC's through work. But if I were your average Joe end user, I'd go Mac and vote with my wallet.

Quote: "Lsavagejt: "The new OS is just an extension of the rampant commercialism that's destroying our country."
This is so true. It's definitely a business world. Sadly, there normally exists a lack of quality coding or code integrity when you have to make money and meet deadlines. And one influence to this, apart from human greed, is the fact that MS is on the share market (right?), which means they have to make more money every year so their shares don't go down in price (right?)."

Both superb comments and quite correct.

12% each year on the money you made last year, or people may as well put their money into a savings account and not invest in your Company. It's called being a victim of your own success. It's almost impossible to maintain this at M$ level. If they stood any chance it was with a "decent" operating system. Failed.

"Rampant commercialism that's destroying our country" - it's not just your Country dude. It's the whole world.

I have been using Vista for the last few months now and to be honest, there are no issues that concern me. Sure, a few security issues asking to allow, but the user can turn those off if they like. As for performance, it outshines XP by far. Drivers? No problem. Not one issue as long as your computer was purchased in the last year or so. Games/Sofware? Only older and I mean older software may have issues, but all in all ALL new and current games run flawlessly and better on Vista than XP. I own 13 computers, and used Windows since 3.1 eons ago, and I know Windows inside and out and how to configure it. Do not expect to buy a low end system and expect it to run Vista as it should be. Over the years many companies sold PCs with the bare minimums of memory/video on systems, and users could not run anything in the game department without upgrades. (companies offering XP machines with only 256MB ram!!!) If you have a good PC, Vista is perfect. People just hate change. XP is old, move on.

I have VISTA HOME PREMIUM rather than the other mentioned ones. Why do I have to pay money to get the other replacement disks? I'm not pleased that MS makes me do this.

I didn't know that this option would be available and I have already taken the computer to a computer store to have XP put on the machine. This will cost me $120.

Signed: "upset".

I have VISTA HOME PREMIUM rather than the other mentioned ones. Why do I have to pay money to get the other replacement disks? I'm not pleased that MS makes me do this.

I didn't know that this option would be available and I have already taken the computer to a computer store to have XP put on the machine. This will cost me $120.

Signed: "upset".

Retail consumers are not requesting to go back to XP??? I work at a tech support help desk - PCs - and you can bet your last dollar they ARE requesting XP! I get calls: "Can I ditch Vista and put XP on this?" "Can I return this? I can't stand Vista!" "Why did MS put out this crap?" And the refurbished XP computers sell before they've had time to sit on the shelf and gather a single spec of dust. I've done so many Full Factory Recoveries on Vista machines I can do them in my sleep (esp. on HPs). Even the supposedly 'fast' 'large' max machines are slow. I've seen 2GB of memory have trouble running Vista. I'll stick with my home built, happy as a clam, never had a twitch that wasn't user caused XP Pro/Firefox, thank you. The only thing that can make me change at this point? Being able to easily add OS X as a dual boot without a lot of mumbo jumbo. (Hear me, Steve? Yo, Steve!)

I have been on the phone with Dell tech support for the past 45 minutes and they know nothing of an XP downgrade disk. Please be aware before you call them.

Hi,
I have a Gateway mx8734. I called Gateway to downgrade to vista twice. I was told I could buy a disk with xp for $200 but If I put it In i would loose my warentee I paid so much for ! I own a copy of xp but can't use it because of loosing my warentee.
I will NEVER buy another Gateway because of this. They said " Don't blame Gatway we didn't make vista. I said NO but you are the ones that won't let me go back to xp !! I HATE my brand new laptop because of Vista and it seems unfair to me I can't revert If I own xp. They tell me it "could" damage my computer, not sure I believe that rubbish. Does anyone know ? Disgusted ! Barb

Sorry Barb, If you really want to go back to XP Pro heres my advice.
1. Use a good disk imaging software like Ghost and make an exact copy of Vista if you had to reimage it for warranty purposes before you begin.
2. Obtain a copy of XP Pro.
3. Back up all critical data to an external device.
4. Wipe it and 'upgrade to xp pro. If your Gateway came with a recovery disk you can try and extract the missing drivers directly from it from 'Device manger' in XP. With the recovery disk in XP right click on the missing driver & reinstall, and point it to the disk. I can't promise the driver will work, however, its better than vista. And you could go back to the image you should've first backed up wourst case scenario. I wish you the best! cheers

JEEZ, there are a lot of whiners out there! First of all, security is an illusion. Macs and Linux boxes SEEM more secure because, as relatively tiny slivers of the installed base, they are not targeted very much. But trust me, Linux and Macintosh malware DOES exist! Linux and MacOS DO have holes that can be exploited.

Microsoft's mistake is in trying to make Vista secure even in the hands of the stupidest, most computing-illiterate users. In so doing, they've made it a pain in the ass for the rest of us. Don't like UAC? SHUT IT OFF! It's easily done. Don't like the eye-candy? You can shut that off, too. But even with the "Aero" interface disabled, the improved icon and thumbnail rendering is very useful to me. Modifying file associations is also much less of a chore. So is wi-fi networking.

Would I have bought Vista? Not at these prices! But it came on my laptop and I'm living with it. One change is that I am dual-booting with GNU/Linux. I REFUSE to drink Steve Jobs' Koolaid!

it seem to me that everybody is still forgetting that windows xp didn't start with pro it was home edition the same home edition that everybody was crying about, the same one that win.98/200 programs didn't work with and the xp home that was trash before xp pro was readily available. the same thing with vista if you ask me..so many people are complaining about vista's slow, need new hardware and ect. maybe you all should have tried vista home on a good machine first and then rate it and then vista ultimate(what i have) because i've had only a few minor problems, not one major incident and i can live with that.
i thought vista ultimate ran well because my computer was a pretty good one but even when i installed it on my older gateway, i still haven't changed my mind. no shutdowns, no files changed or erased and no broken security...ect....
i also have a mac and i won't down vista just to praise the mac. pc does somethings better and the same for the mac. i'd hate to have just one.