A year after Windows XP was withdrawn from sale – and a month before it’s next expiry deadline will surely be ignored – it’s still the system of choice among businesses buying Vista machines. And while only a small majority of home users have downgraded, Microsoft is struggling to win over the holdouts.
Figures produced for Network World show a majority of business owners running Vista machines today have taken up the opportunity to downgrade to XP. That’s the main option available to those wanting to use XP as the system has not been on sale since the end of June 2008. Some PC manufacturers are allowed to sell machines ‘ready downgraded’ though officially that scheme ends later this month.
The same figures also show 12 per cent of home users have downgraded to XP. Among the potential reasons for the difference between the two groups are that business users may have more compatibility problems, businesses with existing XP machines may want to have consistency across their network, consumers have fewer options for downgrading, and consumers may be less willing to pay extra cash simply to carry on using XP after buying a new machine.
The figures also show monthly trends for downgrading on machines from different manufacturers. However, with the sample group having grown almost six-fold over the past year, the patterns may not be an entirely fair comparison as the margin of error will have significantly dropped over time.
For what it’s worth, the two biggest changes are among Dell (which mainly covers business machines), where the percentage running XP on Vista machines has dropped from 43 per cent to 38 per cent, and on Toshiba (mainly consumer machines) where the figure has rocketed from 6 per cent to 15 per cent. Among consumer specialists Acer and HP, and business supplier Lenovo, there has been little change over the past year.
Another note of caution, for both the overall and monthly figures, is that the sample group is made up of members of the exo.performance.network, a service which monitors Windows computers to track performance issues. People who sign up to the scheme are probably much more likely to be computer enthusiasts and thus more likely to go to the effort of downgrading than the general public.
Of course, as we’ve noted before, none of this shows up in Microsoft’s own figures. The company counts any sale of a Vista-enabled machine as a Vista machine, regardless of what system it actually runs. While it could presumably figure out the true percentages through the Windows Update program, it doesn’t show any sign of making such details public.
Source: Blorge
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