30 June 2008 was officially the farewell date for Windows XP. But if you’re looking to buy a new machine and you don’t want to use Vista, there are still some options open to you.
First of all you need to decide if it’s really worth the trouble of avoiding Vista. To help make your mind up, you may find our review of Vista useful, along with our piece questioning whether it’s worth skipping Vista completely and waiting for Windows 7 in a couple of years.
If you are determined to avoid Vista in a new machine, the important thing to remember is what 30 June actually represents: it was the last day that you could buy a boxed copy of XP, and it was the last day of licensing deals for hardware manufacturers who wanted to include XP on their machines. However, there are still ways round the official withdrawal:
Business customers who license Windows can choose whether to use Vista or XP. The price remains the same and you can even replace XP with Vista later on without further charge. However, the cost of licensing means this really is only an option to genuine businesses rather than home users.
If you buy a new PC with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate installed, you are legally allowed to install XP Professional in its place. You should be able to do this using your existing XP disc. Note, however, that you can’t do this with XP Home Edition.
Microsoft is letting manufacturers of some low-powered machines (often called NetBooks or NetTops), which simply aren’t capable of running Vista, continue to sell them with XP installed. Some firms, such as Dell and HP, are taking advantage of a licensing loophole. Their standard set-up for new machines will have Vista installed, but customers will be able to ‘downgrade’ to XP with the price dropped accordingly. This is similar to the way you can sometimes get a discount by removing a standard feature such as a monitor or mouse. To get away with this the firms will officially be giving XP away free of charge with the computer, though in reality they may find an unofficial way to figure it into their pricing. These offers should run until next summer. Laptop firm Lenovo is planning to sell machines with Vista installed but will include an XP ‘recovery’ disk. In theory this is merely there so customers have a back-up option if their copy of Vista somehow gets damaged. In reality, of course, buyers can get their machine and immediately revert to XP. System Builders – people or small firms which build computers from scratch – can still buy XP to install on machines until the end of January 2009. This means you may be able to get a new XP computer from local specialist computer shops. Finally, you could always look into abandoning Windows together and either getting an Apple Mac, or a PC running open-source software such as Linux. That's not an easy decision for everyone, but if you're thinking it over, check out our discussion thread on PCs vs Macs and Neil Henry's articles on Linux and the Mac system.