Upgrading from Vista to Windows XP

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 16:08

IT Industry - Market

I was just discussing this today over a cup of coffee with my computer reseller friend when lo and behold, I see it all over the blogosphere - Windows XP is a superior operating system to Vista! In fact, my friend tells me he often gets requests from customers who have bought pre-loaded Vista machines to "upgrade" them to XP.

Now this may seem disingenuous on my part but I have never really understood why the media is so obsessed with the fact that XP is more than seven years old or that Microsoft has failed because XP hasn't been bettered. To my mind, the continued popularity of XP is testament to Microsoft's success.

I certainly understand why Steve Ballmer and Microsoft want to bury XP and replace it with something else. They're in the business of getting us to spend more money for their products.

However, looking at this dispassionately, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who knows how software works why XP today is so good. In fact, XP is good because of the very reason its would be detractors at Microsoft and in the media would have us believe is a weakness. XP is a mature software product.

Yes that's right. Windows XP is old - it's mature. It's already up to Service Pack 3. It's quite stable now - much more so than when it was first released in late 2001. And just about any application worth having runs on it.

What's more, XP has a relatively modest footprint, is fast loading and it runs beautifully on modest low powered hardware - even a little netbook with an Atom or Celeron processor.

Compare XP to Vista - there's no comparison. Vista is bloated and sluggish. Microsoft got it horribly wrong with Vista. It thought it should still be designing a Moore's Law driven operating system for the Wintel alliance. The concepts of Green IT and low power consumption hadn't penetrated the company's consciousness.

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