New diagnosis gives XP an extra six months to live
It’s now reported that Windows XP could legally be on sale in new machines until July 2009. That’s thanks to a rumoured six month extension to the deadline for computer manufacturers to take advantage of one of several loopholes in XP’s official withdrawal.
As you may remember, the official deadline for selling XP was the end of June this year. However, several manufacturers, including Lenovo, have taken advantage of a licensing loophole involving recovery disks. Between now and 31 January next year, firms are allowed to supply buyers of Vista-enabled machines with an XP recovery disk, as long as they have bought the Business or Ultimate editions.
In theory this is there in case a copy of Windows gets so trashed that the user has to reinstall from scratch. However, Microsoft is quite open about the fact that some users will simply ‘recover’ XP straight away.
While there’s no time limit on supplying the recovery disk to customers buying more than 25 PCs a year, the deadline for anyone else to take advantage is officially 31 January 2009.
However, The Register is now reporting a reader claims to have been told the deadline is now 31 July 2009. The site also says manufacturers are lobbying Microsoft to extend the deadline even further, likely until Windows 7 is on the market. Microsoft hasn’t commented on the claims.
The new deadline for the XP recovery option would coincide with the last date for another loophole, most notably favoured by HP. In this workaround, Vista is the standard operating system supplied in a PC package. However, customers can choose to ‘downgrade’ to XP – and get a price cut – in the same way that they can choose to axe a mouse or monitor from their package. In July HP reported that the majority of business computers they sold involved this option.
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