One of the ways that Microsoft XP is living on is as an operating system choice for low-cost PCs. Microsoft had at first severely limited the hardware that qualified as a low-cost PC eligible for XP. But today, IDG News Service reports that Microsoft is easing those restrictions. The story says:
Under the new terms, outlined in the documents, PC makers must limit screen sizes to 14.1 inches and hard-drive capacity to 160G bytes. ULPCs with touchscreens will also be eligible. Earlier terms set in April did not allow touchscreens at all and limited screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard-drive capacity to 80G bytes. The processors are still limited to a single-core chip running at no more than 1GHz, and memory is limited to 1G byte of RAM.
True Microsoft doesn’t want to hurt sales of Vista by allowing XP to continue to ship on high-powered machines after its much publicized cut-off date. And it doesn’t need to tick off its OEMs who have stood behind the Vista operating system through all its trials and tribulations, swearing to customers that it’s great and should be adopted. But still, this is a good choice and a face-saving move by Microsoft. Why yank a product off the shelves that your customers are screaming for? Doing so only drives them into the arms of competitors.
Go to the Microsoft Subnet home page for more news, blogs, podcasts. Open source could doom Exchange, one IT pro believes Microsoft rolls out new IBM HPC serversMicrosoft releases OOXML-to-HTML translator Good-bye XP, desktop virtualization is the answerAll hail Hyper-V: the hypervisor finally, officially arrivesDozens of great freebie addons for OpsMgr 2007More Microsoft Subnet blog posts:
