Most new PCs shipped without Windows Vista in 2007

Surely, this 100 million figure doesn't take into account the number of people who, like me, received a new PC with Vista in it, tried it a few days to see if they liked it or not, and then formatted the PC to install XP on it.

I'm pretty sure that there's a good percentage of people who did that.

Can you actually claim you "sold" more than 100 million copies, when they were forced down the throat of the public? Thats like going to buy a new car, and EVERY dealer having only one option:

The newest car on the market. It runs slow, isnt what it is supposed to be, its overpriced, and youll probably have to upgrade a lot of its components. You wont be able to turn the radio on and plug your flash drive into it w/out it telling you thats an illegal operation. Every time you put your turn signal on, hit the horn button, turn the wipers on, turn the car off, pop the trunk.... a message will appear on the dash asking "are you sure"? It will only operate on certain roads.

OR...

The public SCREAMS until you bring back a discontinued model thats been around a few years, still has a few bugs, but is the best car put out to date. 

Can you REALLY say you sold 100 million of car #1 if you did it was the publics only mainstream option? You FORCED it on them to try to strong arm everyone into buying your product. And as another reader already pointed out, did the SUBTRACT from that total of 100 million, all the people that left that "new car" parked in the driveway unused, and went back to their older, more reliable car? Vizta caused me to switch to Ubuntu, Im not following the MS barinwashing/strongarming tactics. I am capable of thinking for myself. So far half my machines are dual boot, and hopefully by mid-year, all of them will be. MS is a joke. Vizta is a joke. Nuff said.

Its like my dad always said... "You can polish a dog turd all you want. When its said and done, it's still a piece of shit. It might be a shiny piece of shit, but its STILL just a piece of shit.

The other thing you didn't include in your calculation is the copies that were purchased, but were not on a new computer. That would include two categories:

Retail boxed copies of Vista.

Corporate volume licenses. And as we all know, the vast majority of those are going to be used for licensing XP installs.

So the actual number of new PCs that shipped with vista is even lower. Who knows? Maybe it's as low as 30 or even 25 percent.

heard that specific buyers have legal XP license with Vista license, Vista is not revolutionary, but it is still not as bad as it,

What you fail to realize is that if you buy a computer with Vista you pay for Vista. Then uninstall it and pay for a new copy of XP assuming you are all nice and legal. So you are paying Microsoft twice. Vista is probably the best marketing tool for XP ever.

No $h17. I don't know of anyone who wound up with Vista on their PC and liked it. And I know of only 1 person this year that didn't upgrade from Vista to XP on a new PC they got.

Vista is the worst flop in Microsoft's history...Windows 7 (or whatever they're going to call it) had better suck considerably less than Vista.

Naturally, the problem is that the vast majority of consumers in the world aren't aware of the fact that their OS shouldn't suck, so it probably doesn't hurt M$ all that much.

Oliver,

That sounds like one of those, in vogue, sub-prime tricks which line the pockets of less than wholesome characters. It is a bit of a dumb path to follow though given that the costs are invariably always going to be catastrophic and passed on to the next fall guy.

No wonder Billy Boy is abandoning ship.

I work at Symantec here in Springtuckey Oregon, we buy Dull pc's by the truck load then load xpsp2 over top of the damned vista garbage.


XP had its time perfecting single core in 16 bit NT5, ORIGINATING FROM nt4 & K6, TBIRD. Thats THE Blue Screen of Death era, sieze ups as common as thomas stewart.

Now Vista is next step & Hardware dosn't like idea of redoing much from get-go. Vista Ultimate is BEST it gets, today & coming maturely into its' own Ultie time.

Theres nothing wrong with VISTA at all. Crummy hardware is to blame, So far no post XP Hardware is really out, particularly chipsets & mainboards..

Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

I don't know what all the fuss is about.

I bought an expensive PC so that I could enjoy the Vista 'experience'.

Must go now, I've got to renew my subscription to "Masochists Annonymous"

Ya so if you think vista is bad just wait till you try Linux! Next to zero native games, office apps that are wannabes, wonderful slow drivers that make you want to shed tears, and funky video playback/capture. 

Sorry im still twitching from having to compile a new kernel just to get things working... I first used linux in 1996 and i have been waiting for it ever since, now THATS a long development cycle for an OS! 

Vista works for me to do what i want. I'd go back to XP but vista plays games in window mode more reliably then XP. So i can work and slack off at the same time YAY! 

Plus i can actually appreciate the idea behind UAC for security, i dont just whine about clicking one stinkin button! BAH!

Here in Brazil it's really common for entry-level computers to come with Vista Starter Edition. I have yet to see one of those retain it's original OS for more than a week; they get swiftly replaced with pirated XP.

Many large companies probably overwrite the hard drives in the new computers they get with their own customized XP-based image. It would still count as a Vista sale for M$ if that's what was on the computer originally.

"Vista's high resource demands required users to buy all brand new, expensive hardware systems to run it."

LOL. Ever heard of journalistic integrity? That hugely misleading statement suggests not.

Ya know, there really *are* enough things to criticize Vista for without actually making shiz up.

100 million copies is a fair bit. Vista reminds me of xp when it first came out, heaps of people refusing to move on. Vista is not a bad OS. People will eventually come around, hell i know practically all the guys at work have said they will get vista as soon as sp1 is out, so don't be surprised if suddenly we see surges in vista sales.

The story is fine, but who really cares?

Everyone and their uncle is going to be using Vista in a year or two and we all know it.

Let's talk about Apple!
(just kidding, but not really)

So, instead of buying new hardware to accomodate Vista, switch to Leopard?

I didn't knew Apple released to run on a PC! Otherwise, you'll also have to buy new hardware, isn't it? If so, it cannot be considered as an alternative.

I wish i was a fly so that i could check the Vista/XP percentage of machines that hit the MS patch/update server... :P Must be ridiculously low!...

So what was running on the other 61%? Linux?

there are, oliver, i had to help quite a few people do that while i was working as a tech support agent... an awful job not because of the customers, but the companies... what company in their right mind would sell vista in a box with 512 MBs

Upon purchasing my new ACER 5520-5033 (1.8GHZ dual 64 X2 AMD cpu /1GB DDR ram (768 after vid sharing with an integrated Nvidia 7000m) laptop from Walmart for 497.00 CAD; exactly what I surmised would happen did!

It took 3 hours to install Vista from the stored image on the partitioned hard drive, as there is no .25 cent factory stamped install DVD with these cheapies. BTW, the hard drive was 120GB and the image partition was 30GB...why?

After the 3 hour image install/configuration period this thing took 3-4 minutes to boot to desktop. After I deleted all the bundled bloatware that was installed by the image partition, it still took 2.5-3 minutes to boot. 

Operation of files, tiled windows, Firefox, IE7...et al, opened and closed excruciatingly slowly. The hard drive was crunching incessantly and never really took a breather at any time. Well 3.5 hours in and I had seen enough. I formatted and installed XP Professional in about 1 hour (would've been shorter but the 7000M Nvidia drivers were a bitch to find)

To give you an idea of the performance difference, I can now load VLC 0.8.6b player and enjoy playback of compressed Bluray/HD-DVD files stored in the .mkv format without skipping. That is a pipe dream with this laptop in Vista 32 or 64

I Concur with Olivier Bellemare. Thats just what I did. Vista did not suit my mainly PC gamer needs.

During last weeks I have happily upgraded three older Windows XP Pro PC's .... into Debian Lenny. And the last new one I bought didn't have any preinstalled OS ... and is now Debian :)

...but wasn't the same thing happening when XP was released (ie formatting back to Win2K)?
I suppose as the PC market is twice as big, so it probably means twice as many are going back to XP.

My Dell laptop came with Vista, that did not last long and XP was installed.
XP is far better and Microsoft would do well to continue to offer it.
Any sales at all are because OEM's pre install Vista, given an option I believe most people would chose XP.

67% Xp, 39% Vista ... the rest no OS or other

Since Windows got 106% of the market, there wasn't much other activity I guess :P

How many of these "sales" were really XP 'with a free Vista upgrade when it's released' which then never got upgraded?

How about companies that buy 100 computers at a time and blow away the default install with a company standard image before users even get to see them.

I wouldn't install Vista on my pc even if they were giving it out for free. I would rather use a i486 with Win 95 then Vista anyday.

I bought a new Dell laptop November of 2006, it came with an option for a Vista Upgrade for 10 dollars when I purchased it. I chose the option and received the upgrade media, bit I've never installed it.

I wonder how many of the 100 Million copies fall into this type of category. I bet it is quite a few.

Or take into account the ever increasing number of sold notebooks where one all too often ends up paying for MEII. Surely, many are just happy with their MEII installation but the vast majority could have been much happier with an XP installation for less money. The 100 mio. copies sold only proves Microsoft's monopoly power - not the presence of a superior product. The absence of DirectX 10 on XP is another proof. Thankfully the gaming industry didn’t buy into it and it is limited just how much beta-bloatware an average pc user is willing to put up with just to be able to play Halo without problems on the pc platform.
Vista remains the only windows version where I, like many others, ended up ‘downgrading’ to the previous generation after trying it out, even on brand new hardware. 3.1 -> wfwg -> win95 -> win2000 -> winxp -> vista -> winxp.

I know that Microsoft counts sales from their disk fulfillment centers to their distributor's warehouses as valid Vista sales. I just wonder how many of those Vista retail boxes are piling up high on warehouse shelves about now? 

Likewise how many new PC's shipping with Vista to corporations are having it pulled off and replaced with corporate images of XP Pro. 

I have customers calling me, wanting to know if I can build them a new PC with XP on it. Or they want Vista removed from their new laptop and replaced with XP Pro. This probably benefits Microsoft's bottom line since now they sell two operating systems with each new hardware sale.

Did he mention how many of those 100 million users exercised downgrade rights and are actually using Windows XP?

I know in my previous company, we have been ordering laptops that were supposedly preloaded with Vista Business and Ultimate, but it was wiped and imaged with Windows XP before it even reached our hands.

One more fact, In India you are not getting the laptops & PC with XP anymore, all of them are pre-loaded with vista. So buyers have no choice but to buy vista. And even if they want to install XP on it , most of the driver support is not there for new laptops & PC.

The other thing this 100 million figure does not take into account is Vista Business. Vista Business counts as a legal license downgrade option for XP Professional.

Every company I work for has been purchasing nothing except Vista Business since the first of the year -- simply because it costs the same as XP Pro and counts as an XP Pro license and they can also upgrade to Vista when (if) it become viable. Basically, Vista Business is a win-win scenario.

That said, of all the PC's I know of that have been purchased with Vista Business (several hundred) I know of exactly ZERO of them that are actually RUNNING Vista. They have all been reloaded/reimaged with XP Pro downgrades.

In essence, this makes the 100M unit figure highly suspect in terms of true Vista acceptance. Based on what I know, you can probably assume that Vista Business accounts for at least 20% of Vista's sales numbers -- and probably better than 80-90% of these copies have been rolled back to XP Pro. 


Ditto.

Uncle Bill, in a boost of truthfulness, then added:
"Well...ok...Vista isn't that wonderful
and I'd never buy it as I stick to 
Windows 3.1...but now I am 
leaving...who cares?" >DD

Yeah, I think its like 70% who did that. About 20% simply cant be bothered... or they dont know how to do it :p

I upgraded from XP Home to Vista Home Premium 64bit, and i can't yet say , that this was a mistake. Some drivers are still crappy, but thats not Vista's fault. Even programs which i installed under XP work. However, there are bunch of people, who always blame Vista in everything, at least ~50% of problems aren't caused by Vista. Also many people are going back to Vista with sp1. The performance difference on my computer between Vista and XP is barely 2%. Whether you got Vista or XP, there is no point of changing your OS.

My newish laptop came with Vista. It had some problems until I was forced to deal with the expiry of the 90-day free trial period of the preinstalled NIS07. Due to circumstances, I had to uninstall NIS07 and then install a fresh copy from my 3-license CD.

Once I did this clean reinstall of NIS'07, it sorted out most of the problems (but NIS07 still sucks).

Overall, I find that Vista isn't that bad. Even XP in the early days had a few rough edges, but then got better. Vista seems to be about 90% done. I saw an error message where the internal-to-the-PC link was broken.

Please note that this Vista experience is on a laptop where I'm not trying to plug in all sorts of legacy hardware. I've still got my old desktop running XP with stacks of USB gadgets heaped up around it.

But for simply surfing the net and staying in the middle of the road, my Vista experience hasn't been bad.

YMMV.

I wonder what the WGA/Windows Update numbers say in regards to Windows XP presence versus Windows Vista.

Now yes, those numbers will contain priated copies of XP and Vista, and some copies of XP and Vista never get recorded on WGA or Windows Update, but I believe that overall, the WGA and Windows Update figures should be able to accurately reflect the market that each of those operating systems have. At least in relation to one another.

Certainly, you could see, based on the Windows Update figures, (I am *certain* that a unique identifier that can differentiate one machine from another is sent every time it polls for updates,) how many of those 100 Million copies of Vista "sold" are actually...in use?

Even if Microsoft is to ashamed to tell the Inq, or the world at large those numbers, those numbers matter to software developers everywhere and THEY at least should be told.

Vista/Bill should include coupons for free RAM pc6400? when u provide serial# and model of the mboard :-)

lots of ram (3, 4Gig) = good vista experience = Lots of sales.