Save it? Its not going anywhere, you will still be able to use it for
years to come. Heck, you could still use Windows 3.1 if you wanted to,
no one is stopping you. Same with Windows 2000, NT, 98, ME, 95....
Actually, Windows 98, 2000, ME, and XP OEM licenses are tied to the
specific machine being purchased. In other words, when you decide to
throw out that old 600 Mhz Pentium that had Windows 2000 on it, you
can't use that license on your new Core2 Duo machine. Not only that,
but even if you could find drivers for the new hardware, you might
void the warranty on your PC, including the extended coverage.
Many Linux users purchase an extra hard drive for their laptops
because they need the original Windows disk drive for warranty
service.
Ironically, even if you had the installation media, you couldn't
install Windows 2000 to a VM (which is usually compatible with Windows
2000 as well as XP) on a machine that was originally Licensed with
Vista Home Premium. It's all clearly spelled out in the licenses,
it's even in plain English, which is why it is so easy to misinterpret
the license the way you think it should be, even though you should
always view the license from Microsoft's point of view (maximum
possible revenue).
Furthermore, "downgrades" are also restricted. For example, if you
purchase a Vista machine with Vista Home Premium, you have to
"upgrade" to Vista Business Edition to legally install Windows XP
Professional on that machine.
It's possible that Microsoft may be looking to sell "downgrades" to XP
or Windows 2000 at $200-$400 per machine as a way to make up for the
loss in revenue from OEMs and corporate customers.
The problem for Microsoft is that they have very little bargaining
leverage. With Vista driving the price of desktop computers below the
$300 range, often even below $200 at "clearance prices", and laptops
falling to below $400, it's very clear to the OEMs that Vista is NOT
adding sufficient value to the bottom line of the machine. With Mac
still getting premium prices for all the machines they can build,
their market share by revenue is growing substantially. Companies
like HP, Toshiba, and Acer are likely NOT to follow Dell's lead, and
are very likely to start demanding that Microsoft allow them to sell a
"hybrid" machine that runs Linux as the primary operating system with
either Vista Basic or XP Professional as the secondary operating
system as a VM appliance.
There is even the possibility that HP and Acer will want to offer the
VM appliance to be sold separately for customers who purchase the
LInux versions. If the vendors are able to charge extra for the Vista
appliance, (even though they will purchase in bulk), it gives them the
ability to get a more accurate picture of how many people are using
Linux, with Vista or XP as a secondary "appliance", and how many
people are really willing to put up with Vista's nonsense for a "Vista
Only" machine (for which the OEMs will charge extra).
Many corporations are also moving to "Employee Subsidized"
workstations and laptops. The employee gets the laptop, but if he
wants Vista, Office, or other premium Microsoft software, he has to
pay for it out of his own pocket. If he is willing to go with Linux,
OpenOffice, and the standard Linux/Java applications, then the company
provides the machine at their cost.
Some companies are even considering sanctions against Windows users,
such as docking them for time spent recovering Windows or Vista
systems. Many corporations are now refusing to allow consultants to
bill for time lost due to a faulty laptop. More and more, when
Windows crashes, refuses to boot, or you loose a week's worth of work
because Windows trashed it, it's coming out of the employees own
pocket.
Ultimately, it boils down to an overall unwillingness to put up with
all of the problems and secondary costs of upgrading to Vista.
Corporate investors are tired of watching huge chunks of their profit
get sucked away to Microsoft. Employees are tired of watching their
bonuses drop to zero because Microsoft wants to suck a huge "upgrade
fee" for the upgrades to Vista.
Many corporations have already cut back, or even terminated, their
"support contracts" with Microsoft, since most of Microsoft's
"support" ultimately boils down the the company's on support people
saying "restart the app, reboot the box, reinstall the app, reinstall
Windows, reformat the hard drive and start over" when a user's hard
drive becomes unrecoverable due to a virus, misguided upgrade, or some
third party software that Microsoft doesn't like.
This may be the final show-down for Microsoft. If even one of the
OEMs starts offering Linux as the standard offering and charges extra
for Vista "appliances" and even more for Vista "native mode"
installations, there is a good chance that the others will begin to
follow suit. Remember, Gateway, the company who was fiercely loyal to
Microsoft went virtually bankrupt last year, reporting huge losses,
driving the stock price down to the point where they were about to be
de-listed before ACER bought the whole operation at bargain basement
prices.
Compaq and it's management, even after the HP merger, tried to be
loyal to Microsoft, only to again find that they were becoming such a
loss center that the corporate executives have decided that the merger
was a bad idea.
IBM was losing so much money on Thinkpads and desktops that they sold
their entire PC division to Lennovo, who had been making most of their
hardware anyway. They still have the Netfinity workstations, which
are now all touting the option of XP or Linux, and if Microsoft pulls
XP off the table, they may be going with Linux as the only option.
Even Dell has been scrambling to try and keep from bleeding "red
ink". They have cut back on costs, entered the retail markets, and
tried to find new markets for Dells, most of which have been ordered
with XP Professional instead of Vista.
Microsoft is trying to "bait and switch" promising a new version of
Vista/Windows whatever that will be better than XP, but only if they
agree to suffer with Vista for a few more years. Perhaps 10 years
from now, they will come up with something almost as good as a Mac is
today.
HP has cultivated a very strong relationship with SUSE. Dell has been
working closely with the Ubuntu organization, IBM and Lennovo have
been working closely with Red Hat and SUSE. Acer has been an
aggressive supporter of Linux almost since the release of Windows XP,
and they have made a huge and successful niche market selling "Linux
Ready" machines with XP licenses that permit configurations such as
"dual boot" and "virtualized desktops" or "virtualized laptops".
The biggest problems with Vista are the very things that Microsoft
touts as advantages. Vista has lots of fancy 3D graphics capabilities
(even though most PCs don't support them), and this takes up lots of
memory for unusableb code. Vista has lots of new security features,
most of which interfere with virtualization. The end result is that
Windows 2000 has a footprint of 64 to 256 Megabytes, XP has a
footprint of 256 to 1024 megabytes, and Vista needs 2048 to 4096
megabytes to be "functional".
I recently saw a gartner poll that showed that 80% of all corporations
were looking at alternatives to Windows. Of those, almost 60% were
looking at Linux, 20% were looking at Macs, and 20% were floating down
the river of denial hoping to stay with Windows XP or Windows 2000.
Many banks and other corporations are still using Windows 2000, and
are likely to pull the plug on Windows altogether if Microsoft tries
to pull the plug on 2K or XP.
The problem for Microsoft is that the new mini-laptops have put Linux
on the retailer shelves, at Starbucks, and at airports. When I pull
out my ASUS EEE at the airport, or at a restaurant, people from all
over want to see it. I'm usually editing or reviewing MS-Office
documents using OpenOffice, but I'll take a few minutes to show them
the browser, email, media player, picture viewer, and other
application software, and won't even hesitate to mention that I got it
for under $300, less that a smartphone. I'll even show them skype and
tell them that is my cell phone. When they observe "that's not
Windows is it?", I'll happily point out that no, it is Linux, which
does a lot more with a lot less, which means I don't get those long
"pauses" where the computer won't do anything. I also point out that
it takes 30 seconds to come up with a fully functional system, not
just a desktop "splash screen" that won't actually do anything useful
for another 20 minutes.
..
Meanwhile, Windows is becoming more "Linux Like". Now, when I launch
Microsoft Office from Windows, I can go back and work on something
else while I'm waiting for it to load. Ironically, Linux has had that
feature since 1993, and Sun Unix had that feature back before Windows
3.0 was released. The irony is that Linux applications start so
quickly now that I barely get a chance to do anything else before the
new application is fully functional and ready to be used..
And the Open Source applications like FireFox and OpenOffice also have
a feature that has been standard on Linux/Unix for almost 20 years,
called "session recovery". When you shut down the applications (such
as shutting down the Linux system), the Linux system can "save
desktop" and when you reboot, all of the applications are restarted.
If the applications have "Restart Session" capabilities, Linux will
recover the application windows to almost exactly the same state as
when the machine was shut down.
Windows users get the secondary benefit in that they can manually kill
applications using task manager or reboot, and then, when the
applications are restarted, the user has the option of recovering the
session.
Still, Microsoft Windows/Vista has a terrible problem with memory
churn and garbage collection. They also have very heavy context
switching overhead, which means that if you have lots of open and
active windows, even windows that are not being displayed, you can
churn lots of memory and CPU cycles doing almost nothing.
Linux is much more efficient, with memory, with CPU cycles, and with
storage, reducing the amount of time spent picking a file out of
fragmented drives, thrashing into an application to display a flash
program that isn't visible, or trying to check for events that haven't
happened. Linux runs what it needs to, when it needs to, using
technology developed by IBM for it's mainframes back in the 1970s,
which means fewer wasted CPU cycles, fewer wasted disk rotations, and
fewer wasted network cycles.
