With previous versions of Windows like Windows 98 or 2000 it was fairly easy to move back to them if you weren’t happy with Windows XP. This was back in the good old days when software didn’t require to phone home all the time to check for piracy. Things have changed and this is the world we live in now. Microsoft has made it exceedingly more difficult to move back to XP if you have Vista installed.

If you want to activate Windows XP on a system preinstalled with Vista then you must call Bill Gates’ home and ask him to issue you a new key. If and that’s a big if he is in a good mood, he or one of his many hordes MIGHT be willing to help you.

So far they haven’t left anyone out in the cold but the time is going to come when someone at Microsoft is going to tell someone “no” and that someone will just have to live with Vista or switch to Linux or even Mac.

The problem with this is that each and every copy of XP you have needs to be activated manually so if you’re a business with 100 computers that have Vista and XP installed, you need to enter a key manually on each and every single one. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

In an article at ChannelWeb, Microsoft says it is doing it’s very best to deal with these issues and is playing the software piracy card on this one. That’s not very comforting for the companies or small businesses that have to put up with these issues. Microsoft doesn’t seem trust its customers otherwise such rampant and sometimes wrong systems would not be in place.

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Related:

US Government Agencies ban Vista

Microsoft finds difficulty in attracting Vista, IE7 users

Most developers prefer XP over Vista

Vista aero glass, hot or not?

Wait six months after SP1 before moving to Vista

Entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 1:51 pm under Microsoft, Upgrading, Vista.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.