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Solve : swap vista for xp? |
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Answer» i have a dell desk top with windows vista operating system. does microsoft allow me to go to xp without paying for another version? i have a dell desk top with windows vista operating system. does microsoft allow me to go to xp without paying for another version? No Quote from: JJ 3000 on January 01, 2012, 06:16:38 AM No False. Quote from: reddevilggg on January 01, 2012, 06:09:00 AM If you want to go from Vista to XP, you'll have to buy a version XP. Not necessarily. References: http://superuser.com/questions/7479/legally-downgrade-windows-vista-home-oem-license#39252 http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/what_to_do_downgrade_rights.aspxThe OEM versions of Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate include downgrade rights to: Microsoft Windows XP Professional Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. No downgrade rights are included in other Windows Vista products. If you can't live with Vista, why not buy a Windows 7 upgrade disk rather than go backward to XP? Quote from: soybean on January 01, 2012, 09:11:21 AM If you can't live with Vista, why not buy a Windows 7 upgrade disk rather than go backward to XP? I agree, i've never understood downgrading, Windows 7 is excellent. Some people just prefer XP because it's what they are comfortable with...but i agree as well. Quote from: reddevilggg on January 02, 2012, 06:20:04 AM I agree, i've never understood downgrading, Windows 7 is excellent.Personally, while I can't claim that Win7 is not better than Vista, Because it does make improvements, as one ought to expect from each software iteration, I also think Vista got a lot of ill-deserved flak, mostly as a result of both an initial "It's different, so it sucks" idea and mob-think and RUMOURS. Primarily, I think it's computer manufacturers fault for scraping the bottom of the barrel for system components and passing it off as a usable machine running Vista, when it wasn't. The common thought to many is that Windows 7 is "Windows Vista done right" Aside from a few minor things, I'm hard-pressed to see exactly what is "fixed" in Windows 7 that was "Broken" in Vista. Sure, UAC is less INTRUSIVE now, and they added some whimsical mouse gestures and improved Aero-based features, but none of those were broken in the Vista implementation. If anything was broken in XP, Vista, and 7, it would be the laughable implementation of security on XP; not so much that the system is not securable but rather that so much of the default configuration is designed first for compatibility, and security is something of an afterthought; working with Limited User Accounts is a gigantic pain on XP, so nobody does it, and it's not the default so most people have no idea that their systems are WIDE open, because they are essentially running "as root". Anybody familiar with Unix/Linux knows that, on those systems, running as the root user is not and has never been regarded as a good practice, and as linux slowly gains market penetration, we are going to see more and more malware targeted towards it and that will undoubtedly pick up countless security issues in their implementations, not running applications as a root user helps mitigate the threat of privilege escalation say running a ssh shell as root, if a buffer overflow allows a remote user to execute a shell, they'd have root access to the entire system since that shell would have the same rights as the parent process). In many ways Vista is an example of the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" idea. People(and particularly *nix snobs) had been poking fun at windows default security settings for years. Microsoft started to pay serious attention to security with XP, particularly Service Pack 2, but in many ways all their efforts were almost moot, because many services ran under the "LOCAL SYSTEM" account, which can be equated to the root user. A lot of the flaws and hot-fixes they had to release over XP's service life wouldn't have been the huge deal they were had XP's default security setup been more restrictive. But, at the same time, had they done that, people would have issued the same complaints they did with UAC "It says I don't have permission to copy the file, It's my computer!", and UAC was a fairly streamlined implementation. This brings to the fore the common misconception; with, say, UAC, when UAC is requesting elevation, it's not so much requesting that you elevate your privileges, but it's more along the lines of "hey, this program want's administrator rights, should I give them to it?" It's about the permissions of the application not yourself. Even with Windows Explorer. It's not trying to protect you from yourself, as many claim. That said, I think we can all agree there are inherent flaws in the implementation of UAC, just as their are inherent flaws in the implementation of Graphical sudo; specifically, the fact is, UAC (and gksudo and variants) work by way of a dialog box. So this already presents us with something of an issue, since when it comes to dialog boxes, the first thing people typically think when they appear, is "how do I get rid of this thing". If you are in the middle of Task A (which could be file management, maybe working in word, or excel, or whatever) and suddenly out of nowhere, A Dialog box appears, it doesn't really matter what the content of that dialog box is, the most important thing for you at that time is "e how do I make this go away and go back to Task A?". To those of us who use computers on a daily basis, we might pay a bit more attention to dialog boxes, but the overriding theme is still there- we want them to go away. They are still interruptions, after all. This may sound weird, but UAC in many ways reminds me of the Setup program for Windows 95. When you installed Windows 95 and there was already an existing OS- say, another windows 95 install and you were reinstalling, setup would check to see if the file it was copying already existed, and if it did, it would see if the existing version was newer. If it was, then the setup program would ask the user "do you want to replace this file? the one you have is newer". I imagine this stems from a popular programmer mentality- "Well, I don't know what to do, so I'll ask the user", which seems sensible. But your typical user isn't going to know any more than the software does what to do. All they see in that dialog box is "problem blah blah blah". Users don't like problems. So, your typical user sees that dialog, and they go "uhh... well I guess I'll keep the newer one". few seconds later, they get another one; so they click yes again. Then they get another, and eventually all these prompts start to make them nervous. Why is it asking all these questions? did you answer them wrong? After all, to most users, questions like that only appear when you've done something wrong and the computer us giving you one last chance before something happens that you'll both regret. So they might change their answer, and what you end up with is mixed versions and This dialog, and this type of dialog, reminds me of UAC, because fundamentally, the user doesn't care. They are being asked a question that in the average case they are ill-equipped to answer. How do you know whether to allow the program to elevate? What connotations does elevation have? From a security perspective it's much better, because it provides that "last chance before something horrible happens" if you run a trojan or something, whereas before you could often get infected merely by browsing the web. But it doesn't really provide much of a benefit to the end user, they just want the dialog to go away, and you typically have people simply disabling UAC altogether, which pretty much rolls back the security model to a "run everything as an administrator" unless you take special steps to create Limited User Accounts, but then you have to switch users to install software or run things as an administrator, and your average user doesn't care about the security implications, since if they did, they wouldn't have disabled UAC in the first place. Vista does seem to have ALOT of 'haters' and can never understand why. Each OS is better than the last. Though i agree with BC's statement Quote I think it's computer manufacturers fault for scraping the bottom of the barrel for system components, because i've seen that alot. Anyway, I've heard that XP will be an abandonware in less than three years. Updates ends in 2014. Quote from: maxum on January 02, 2012, 09:36:24 AM Anyway, I've heard that XP will be an abandonware in less than three years."abandonware" doesn't exist as a legal classification of software. It's a term made up by people who pirate the software in order for them to pretend that they aren't. Quote from: maxum on January 02, 2012, 09:36:24 AM Anyway, I've heard that XP will be an abandonware in less than three years.Updates ends in 2014. I don't think any Microsoft product has ever become "abandonware" in the sense of becoming copyright-free, if that is what you meant. Quote from: Salmon Trout on January 02, 2012, 10:58:04 AM I don't think any Microsoft product has ever become "abandonware" in the sense of becoming copyright-free, if that is what you meant. Correct. Except maybe "Bob".... Quote from: patio on January 02, 2012, 11:19:00 AM Correct. I've told you not to call me that. |
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