You want to buy a Dell, but you want an operating system that actually works Windows XP. Well, according to this Computerworld article, that’s going to cost you an extra $50 depending on what you buy. If it’s a Vostro, you pay $20 – $50 depending on what you get. However Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision get $0 upgrades downgrades to XP. This is to get around the June 30th Microsoft imposed deadline to stop shipping computers XP. What Dell is doing is taking advantage of the downgrade rights built into Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. That loophole allows Dell to install Windows XP Professional in lieu of Vista, although Vista is still shipped with the machine so that the new PC owner can downgrade upgrade from XP to Vista if it actually works right in the near future when the time is right. I wrote about how this makes both Dell and Microsoft happy in a previous post.
I would expect other PC companies to do the same thing so that they don’t lose business to Dell. When I hear anything, I’ll let you know.