How Badly do you Want XP?
Despite the fact that XP was officially defunct as of 6/30/08, at least according to official Microsoft policy, it appears you can still get it if you really want it. The catch is, you may need to lie (not that this would be a particularly heinous thing to do) to your PC vendor.
The bone that Redmond decided to throw to its customers involves a very weirdly structured “downgrade” policy that vendors can opt to use if they want to. Every vendor is handling it differently, but effectively you can buy a Vista PC and ask that the vendor downgrade it to XP before it ships.
The official policy, and where the little white lie might come in, is that only business-class systems are eligible for the downgrade. All “home” users are stuck with Vista no matter how much they plead. This said, I wouldn’t touch XP Home with a ten foot cattle prod anyway. I can’t stand the “Media Edition” and have no use for most of its alleged features, as long time readers well know.
The “business users can have XP” caveat makes some sense, since many businesses have refused to deploy Vista due to application incompatibilities and other issues. When you have 20,000 desktops to manage, you need to be absolutely sure everything works. You also don’t want rogue OS bugs trashing your network or making all the lights on the Help Desk phones light up at once.
According to the author, getting the XP “downgrade” from various companies was sometimes easy and sometimes not. Some employees didn’t seem to know all the ins and outs of the process. So if you want XP, be prepared to argue. Be sure to check your vendor’s site before trying to order, so you can cite chapter and verse of their particular policy to a recalcitrant sales rep if necessary.
Or you can do what I’m doing: retaining my old XP licenses so I can just transfer them to new machines when needed. I own four valid copies, and no one’s prying them from my fingers anytime soon.