Upgrades, downgrades & a general mess

[Guest]

For reasons beyond our ability to fathom, the boss bought 5 new PC's from
Dell with Vista on them. After finding out that half the software in the
world and almost ALL of our software won't run on Vista, we contacted Dell to
try to find out about downgrading to XP. We might as well have called and
said "My talking book uncle monkey hat." It's Pointless! It's Usless!
It's Dell!

We went out & bought 4 copies of XP pro which we manged to load with agreat
deal of problems (Dell Driver Hell) and now all four computers are giving us
a 28 day countdown to activation.

Even if we bite the bullet and start upgrading all our systems to XP, we're
ALWAYS loading & reloading software & swapping motherboards and trying to
stay ahead of 32 of the dumbest end users on the planet -- there is NO WAY we
can keep track of what number goes with what motherboard, where, when & how
we've had to change something. So my question is this: How is this handled
by people who have hundreds or thousands of computers?

 

[LVTravel]

It's simple. They purchase the Enterprise edition of XP with X number of
licenses for the site (Open License). Same activation key for all the
boxes. Contact your software vendor and ask about it.

The problem you are having is going to occur more and more with new
computers. The new hardware will not have XP compatible drivers available
since the device developers aren't going to write drivers for old operating
systems and people are going to be forced to purchase an upgrade (if
available) to their application software to run on the newer systems if it
is not compatible with Vista OS. I have seen instances of this when IE 7
for XP came out. It was not compatible with a VPN program that a large
business in my community was using. The VPN program is very expensive to
upgrade for the limited software budget of the company so they can't use IE7
or Vista on any of their systems.

 

[Guest]

I appreciate the response -- you're right, of course. So far, every O/s
we've installed has been licensed because it's been OEM from the hardware
vendor and their s/w runs perfectly fine if we install & configure one & then
use Ghost to clone the other 8 or so. Where that becomes difficult is when
whatever series of PC we bought is changed and the internal chipset isn't the
same.

Anyway .... I think we're going to revert back to Win2000 for now, just do
without support .. and eventually, one day in the distant future, Vista will
have been debugged.

Thanks for the response.

 

[Laughingstar~*]

Exactly why the public is turning to the Macs. MS is turning out new
software and OS faster than the average user (who is supporting MS) can
learn to use it. Exhausting.

 

[LVTravel]

If you thought you had driver problems on a new machine that
came with Vista, wait until you try to install 2000 on it.
That will be absolute driver hell.

You can purchase machines from Dell (not all models) without
an OS but with the new OS driver disk included. You then
use your Enterprise version of the OS to install the
operating system. We have been using Dell OptiPlex systems
now for about 6 years without a real driver problem with
Enterprise 2000 Pro as our OS. Dell is now unfortunately
not supporting 2000 well for their new business without OS
systems since they can't buy the hardware (modem,
motherboard, video, etc.) with drivers for the older OS to
install into the boxes they build.