Downgrading

A friend of mine decided it was time to give her five year old laptop the proverbial "heave-ho" and asked me if I would give her list of potential replacements the once over. I agreed, and began by following a link that she had sent me for a Dell Vostro 1510. Under the OS entry in the specifications tab, I noticed that a customer could opt to either accept the preinstalled Windows Vista, or pay $99 for downgrade rights to Windows XP. "Oh, you want XP? Yeah, sure, but it'll be... A HUNDRED BUCKS!!!!!"

I recently reformatted my father's computer, relegating it from Vista to XP. This was primarily to rectify some home network issues that he'd been having with a printer but also because he found the folder navigation to be slightly unintuitive. Of all the computers that I've reformatted, this was the biggest deal so far. Multiple forums suggested that the only possible solution to overcome some of the issues I experienced would be through a complicated process called "slipstreaming". Fortunately, temporarily shutting down the Advanced Controller Interface in BIOS seemed to work, too. Sheesh, Microsoft is such a Vista bully. No wonder Ralph Nader doesn't like them.

Rumor has it that beta versions of Windows 7 are flopping around the Internet already. So for those of you who couldn't wait to get your mitts on an underdeveloped, underfeatured rebranding of Vista*, your prayers have been answered!

-Ryan

*unfair assessment