1-in-3 Vista Buyers Swap To XP

Microsoft might want the world to believe that Vista is a massive improvement over XP but, according to new research in the US, the public strongly disagree. In fact, some startling figures indicate that 1-in-3 are downgrading their Vista PC or laptop to good old XP.

Devil Mountain Software said nearly 35% of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP. Microsoft has already had to extend the life of XP due to furious customer demand.

Craig Barth, the chief technology officer of Devil Mountain, explained:

"Either these machines were downgraded by [sellers like] Dell or HP, or they were downgraded by the user after they got the machine. In any case, these machines are no longer running Vista. The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base. People are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights."

It seems that many have been taking advantage of Microsoft 's end user licensing agreement (EULA), whereby Vista Business and Vista Ultimate can be 'downgraded' to XP Professional. Those businesses that purchase Vista Enterprise can also downgrade to XP.

Barth based the stats on data provided by users to the company's exo.performance.network, coupled with data from Infoworld, collating things like the vendor and system model number with manufacturers' catalogs. The result was a large list of machines shipped in the last 6 months, the vast majority of which were offered with Vista as standard. The sample may not be applicable to all Vista business users but it's certainly big enough to cause some concern.