NEC has launched a product to let network administrators downgrade machines running Windows Vista to XP.
The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) first made the product, NEC FlexLoad, available to customers on 25 January. However, the product was officially launched on Tuesday.
The product's first DVD sets up a partition on the hard drive and installs core XP files and drivers, while the second DVD installs the remaining XP files in the partition, said Newbould.
NEC recommends that customers burn a Vista recovery CD before installing the XP partition.
NEC Australia said it had received no word as yet on when the product would be available locally.
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From June, OEMs can no longer supply machines with XP as the operating system, said Newbould, yet customers still want to buy machines running the operating system.
"From June on, we can only ship Vista, but the market requires XP," said Newbould. "A lot of [larger] customers want to stay with XP for now, as it's a difficult task to migrate [a lot of machines]."
Newbould added that a percentage of customers see no need to move to Vista, as XP serves their needs adequately, and XP will be supported on the current Microsoft roadmap until 2012.
"We do have some customers who are very happy with XP and see [no need] to move to Vista at the moment," said Newbould. "XP is a well-established platform for customers to operate from."
NEC customers purchasing machines in bulk can also request that NEC preinstall the XP partition on their machines. Newbould said that NEC FlexLoad falls entirely within the Vista download policy, and so NEC did not have to negotiate with Microsoft when the OEM developed the software.
In November last year, analyst firm Gartner told ZDNet.com.au's sister site silicon.com that businesses had no appetite for Vista, while analyst firm Ovum agreed that uptake had been slow. "It's taking a bit longer than expected with business take-up," said David Bradshaw, analyst at Ovum. "Realistically, it's a major cost for businesses and businesses really, really need to see the benefit first. And that benefit [regarding Vista] isn't going to emerge completely for a year or two."
Computer giant Dell also offers customers the choice to downgrade to XP, with its Dell XP Pro install disc.
"Dell is committed to offering customers a choice of operating systems, so they can select the one that is best suited to their needs," Dell said.
It is a pity Microsoft just does't get it.
WE DON"T WANT VISTA ON OUR CORPORATE SYSTEMS AT THE MOMENT.
Ballmer can throw as much money at advertising and marketing as he want - but he hasn't twigged to the fact that users (corporate and home) are now far more informed than before and can easily cut through the marketing trash to the real information - blogs share experiences between hunderds of thousands of people - real world , hands on experiences - word of mouth has always been a far more effective marketing tool than dollars.
Prove it is stable, secure and less resource hungry and we may contemplate it.
Meanwhile we now work on re-installing XP on all new systems we get with Vista installed. Of course this would not be possible without Microsoft allowing backward licence compatibility - I wonder how long this will last before the "visionaries" decide that this will no longer be an option and remove that licencing flexibility?
The "visionaries" at Microsoft should really stop trying to push our business into "their" world and come into "our" world and see the real challenges of doing business - end users, customers - oh and yes - our shareholders - you know those people that fork out their hard earned cash so we can do better business and then provide a return for them.
We don't have endless buckets of money to upgrade system specifications so that our Vista systems perform at the same level as our XP systems.
An of course the old addage (forged on Microsoft Windows NT4 - remember it getting to servive pack 6a??)
"Wait for the first service pack and see how it goes after that"