Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista continue to significantly trail those of Windows XP during its early days, according to a soon-to-be-released report. Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product's first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-09-13
2. People wanted backwards compatibility with stuff they were running on Windows 98, but perhaps wanted something more secure: Windows 2000 was suitably secure, but didn't really provide as much consumer-level backwards-compatibility as XP for using older hardware, and also... Windows 2000 didn't have nearly as fancy of GUI eye-candy (not to be underestimated with the standard consumer in terms of marketing importance).
Why just, is not created a win9x compatibility mode running in virtual machine mode?
Member since:2007-09-13
2. People wanted backwards compatibility with stuff they were running on Windows 98, but perhaps wanted something more secure: Windows 2000 was suitably secure, but didn't really provide as much consumer-level backwards-compatibility as XP for using older hardware, and also... Windows 2000 didn't have nearly as fancy of GUI eye-candy (not to be underestimated with the standard consumer in terms of marketing importance).
Why just, is not created a win9x compatibility mode running in virtual machine mode?
Member since:2006-12-05
Member since:
2006-05-26
Mind you, these aren't the only two, but they are very important to keep in proper context:
1. Windows 98 (how many people actually voluntarily tortured themselves with ME? Windows 98SE was actually decent and fairly stable for such a system that was rather backwards-compatible - assuming you knew what you doing) wasn't able to make effective use of hardware resources that were becoming readily available, and wasn't capable of dealing with internet security issues very well.
2. People wanted backwards compatibility with stuff they were running on Windows 98, but perhaps wanted something more secure: Windows 2000 was suitably secure, but didn't really provide as much consumer-level backwards-compatibility as XP for using older hardware, and also... Windows 2000 didn't have nearly as fancy of GUI eye-candy (not to be underestimated with the standard consumer in terms of marketing importance).
XP, when setup and administered correctly, is more than capable of keeping up with most modern hardware, assuming device manufacturers keep providing XP drivers for them (silly not to at this point still), and is also (assuming well-written drivers and proper administration) boringly stable with stable hardware that's not overclocked or pushed past engineered environmental design criteria. In addition, there's plenty of drivers still available for XP (via Windows 98 drivers that may still work, or newer XP-specific ones) for what's now considered "older hardware" so why should people go out and buy a new OS that likely requires that they go through the trials of testing out new drivers using a new driver model, assuming they're available?
Windows XP is Windows Vista's worst enemy: it's more than good enough for those that need to use Windows, and at this point, is most universal and compatible with all but the most ancient of software. If you administer it correctly, you don't need to reinstall for many years at a time (I only had to do a new installation last year due to the booting hard drive dying, after installing it once when it came out). Sadly, I don't represent the average user experience in that it seems most people self-inflict most problems by installing ad-ware, getting spyware installed, etc. by their habits and not practicing safe hex.