Out with the Old, and in with the New?

I had a need recently to go out and purchase a new laptop. Not rocket science by any means but it sure seemed to get to that point by the time I was done. All that led to more conclusions. First some background.

For my wedding anniversary this year I wanted to buy my wife her own laptop. She was the only one in the house without one so it made sense. Also, having her have a machine that was portable would allow for her to use a computer without needing to be in the office. This is not convenient at times as I frequently need to be alone in office for meetings and conferences as well as recording web and voice mail broadcasts.

The trouble began when I went looking for a laptop with XP preinstalled on it. I have had no end of issues with machines requiring to be downgraded from Vista to XP. I did not want to have to deal with all the issues of training my wife on Vista, nor dealing with driver issues due to the downgrade. So with that I was off looking for a machine with XP on it. After looking long and hard I only found 1 out of about 50 that I looked at at various places. I wound up with a Lenovo machine from an online retailer. To their credit, I had the machine in 3 days, just in time for my anniversary, and it has worked perfectly thus far.

So what's the point? First, I believe all consumers and enterprises should be afforded the opportunity to choose which OS they want. It would be in Microsoft's best interest to offer both XP and Vista and allow all OEMs to do the same. They would be best served to make Vista be so compelling to change to that requests for XP drop to near zero. At that point only should they discontinue supporting it. Better yet, how about letting another organization support it on into the future. Thus far it is apparent that the only reason for the uptake in Vista is that Microsoft has forced it upon the distribution channel. Owners are truning off so many features of Vista just to make it perform that it is hardy worth having it.

I will do everything I can to stick with XP until it is "time" to switch. In the mean time, the only thing getting old around here is me.