How can I get rid of vista home premium?

[bujubanton]

Hi all,
I just bought a new Dell laptop, which came with vista home premium installed. The problem is that I want to install a second language and the OS refuses to do that. Can I roll back to XP easily?
Thanks for your help

[jbennet]

No. Vista Home doesnt come with Downgrade Rights, and its very hard to buy new copies of XP any more. Your only solution, if you must have XP, is to go out and buy a copy of it (at significant expense) and install it, just as if it was a brand new machine you had just built.

Try atleast Vista (with UAC off) and tell me why is it refusing to install the secondary language ? any errors ?

[kaninelupus]

Vista HP does come with the one-language limitation from memory - only the high-end builds supported it. Given that you just bought it, you should be eligible for the discounted Win7 > then upgrade to Win7 Ultimate (the only build to support MultiLingual User Interface) or Pro for localised language change-over (which from memory is user account based).

The other option is to upgrade Vista now, which I'm pretty sure gives you the discounted upgrade to the equivalent Win7 build on release.

[jbennet]

given that you just bought it, you should be eligible for the discounted Win7 > then upgrade to Win7 Ultimate

Upgrade versions arent available in Europe, and windows 7 isnt coming out for months anyway.

[kaninelupus]

Upgrade versions arent available in Europe, and windows 7 isnt coming out for months anyway.

RC1 is available for free, and if upgrades not available in Europe (courtesy of EU witch-hunt), buy the RETAIL build of Win7 pro or higher when released... usually proves a better install than OEM build anyhow :)

[jbennet]

yeah but I like to a) keep my existing stuff and b) get it for cheap, hence being angry at the subgrade situation.

[kaninelupus]

yeah but I like to a) keep my existing stuff and b) get it for cheap, hence being angry at the subgrade situation.

A pain to be true, but have you considered why MS is making it increasingly difficult to revert to XP?? Here's a few to mull on:

• XP, nearly 10yrs old, is now patched to the wazoo, and still flawed - newer Windows builds have upped the anti on inbuilt security measures.
  
• XP and earlier allowed poorly written apps to plant/store info in all the wrong places, as well as poorly encoded uninstallers being able to remove core system files on the way out. Vista broke away from that.
  
• XP had serious performance capabilities that left Vista in the dust. With Win7 even managing to often outpace XP, that limitation is set to no longer be an issue.
  
• How long do you think MS wants to be investing the time and energy required to intensively support 3 Windows platforms (more if you consider that all three are released in both x86 and x64 architectures)?? Do we really want the company developing an OS to be spread that thin??
  
• Beyond MS, how keen do you think other hardware and software devs are to continue porting multiple versions of their wares?? In this time of economic down turn, that's a cost many companies can do without. In fact, we are already seeing some software devs moving away from XP - CS4 for example does not support XP (I don't think CS3 did either). AV's and Anti-malware suites designed for XP commonly don't work on Vista or Win7.

Windows has a rather unusual position in the market in that it is soon to have not one but three OS builds in use. Where Apple can forcibly move things along (and how any unhappy Mac users do you foresee when many realise their current machine is incapable of running Snow Leopard??) and Linux users tend to be quicker to progress, the primary cash-card for MS (being businesses) is much slower to move forward. We saw this have an impact on Vista, where the OS release was kicked back nearly two-and-a half-years to re-write for greater XP compatibility - and look at the performance issues that caused!!

Now maybe that all seems rough for one looking to save money on upgrading, but really, what are the alternatives - a whole hep of continuing compatibility issues plaguing the end-user as devs are stretched increasing thin, often on shrinking budgets??

[jbennet]

A pain to be true, but have you considered why MS is making it increasingly difficult to revert to XP

I wasnt talking about XP. The european version of windows 7 isnt going to allow upgrades from VISTA as its impossible due to the IE situation.

P.S i agree with what you said, i am not condoning keeping XP at all? Its driver support sucks, the only benefit is speed.

[kaninelupus]

I wasnt talking about XP. The european version of windows 7 isnt going to allow upgrades from VISTA as its impossible due to the IE situation.

Appologies... the reference to the "subgrade situation" implied a reversion back to XP.

Agreeances on speed advantage comparing XP to Vista, but hopefully the enduser will be quick to realise that Win7 quite capable of outpacing XP (which to be perfectly honest surprised the hell out of me) and thus hope people make the transition.

Can feel your pain on the upgrade costs though, although being in Scotland, can't you at least pre-order like the rest of the UK (I know it's the E version - thank the EU for one!!) and save that way?? It seems to suggest so here.

Here in Australia, we have the upgrade option for those buying a new machine, but no BL@@DY pre-order available... thankyou SO MUCH MS!!

[jbennet]

Yeah, subgrade was a spelling mistake, it was meant to say upgrade
:)

And i dunno, i havent looked into pre-ordering yet.

Win7 quite capable of outpacing XP

I disagree to an extent (in terms of utilising multiple CPUs and improved caching, yes,but in terms of efficiency, no) , but its only a minor tradeoff, considering it scales much better, and most people have fairly high end hardware nowadays.

For machines with 512mb or less of RAM and >1ghz CPUs, XP is probably the best your going to get, but for machines with 1gb of ram, windows 7 does seem to be faster than vista (i think this is just because its less bloated by default, as opposed to architechtural changes, as server 08 (which is based on a stripped down, modular version of Vista SP1) runs well on systems with 512mb-1gb)

My machine (Pentium IV @ 3.8ghz with 3gb RAM) runs about the same with vista and windows 7 (although it flies with XP). Than again, as a gamer, i prefer the newer systems for improved graphical and audio capabilities.