Microsoft plans to take XP off the shelves on 30 June this year. Although there's been precedent for extending deadlines a number of times in the past (it took a long time to kill off Windows 98), it still sets a time limit within which you can pick up a copy of XP without a lot of hassle. Even now the stocks are starting to dwindle, and people will eventually be limited to eBay.

So how do you get Windows XP preinstalled on your laptop instead of Vista? Sadly unless you're buying a business class machine, by and large you can't -- most come with some flavour of Vista. As laptop lines are refreshed, even XP-based business laptops will slowly dwindle away. Currently Dell is the only remaining vendor including XP on some of its consumer range.

Fortunately a lot of vendors are including a Windows XP restore CD with their laptops -- a CD you can boot from to wipe out Vista and install XP. Microsoft is offering this program for machines with Vista Ultimate and Business installed until 31 January, 2009, although it us up to the vendor as to whether they support this and to what extent.

The recovery CD completely wipes all existing data, so don't expect anything to survive. Burn your important files to disc or copy to an external drive beforehand.

If your vendor hasn't included a Vista install DVD with your laptop, you'll want to create a Vista recovery DVD as well -- the process for this will be different depending on the vendor, and most bundle a tool to do the job. Some will already provide a recovery partition on your hard drive, that is accessed by the recovery CD -- so make this isn't deleted when installing XP!

Microsoft will support consumer versions of XP until 14 April 2009, and security updates will continue to be provided until 8 April, 2014.

Below is a table of the current laptops offered on the market with XP as an option, as well as the particular brand's downgrade policy. Please note this may change as new models are offered and old ones reach end of life.