Actually, this is about what you'd expect. The installed base is larger today, but the hurdles to uprade are higher too (most people didn't worry about a video card upgrade when they were considering moving to XP). There's probably the same percentage of "early adopters" today as there was when XP shipped, and they're the people who upgrade. But in general, upgrade sales are going to be far less significant than OEM shipments with new computers. And if you look at OEM shipments...

XP was released late in 2001; the winter of 2001-2002 was a very slow time for PC sales. Total shipments in 2002: 132M
http://www.crm2day.com/news/crm/EpuFEFAuAlMLBYsXCR.php

Total shipments in in 1Q06: 60M, which projects to an annualized 240M
http://www.internet-nexus.com/2007/04/q1-2007-worldwide-pc-market-s...

So PC sales are running at about twice the rate today, a quarter after Vista's launch, as they were a quarter after XP's launch.

So, knowing that, what should we expect? We'd expect Vista to be shipping at twice the rate of XP. In other words: no news here, move along. (Though, given that a lot of OEMs are offering the choice of XP or Vista, it might be marginally interesting that Vista isn't doing any worse than this).

What we don't know, and what Microsoft isn't going to talk about, is how many people are returning Vista, or putting it on a shelf while they go back to XP.

I'd like to see retail vs pre-loaded sales.

Also when I was a network jockey in 96 at a hospital we had like 1000 pc's. We never installed MS's latest versions, but purchased the newest licenses because they were no longer selling the old ones and the rep said that was fine.

I remember the XP vs 98 gaming discussions. I see a lot more flak over vista problems I think. Def not as smooth, and I think people were surprised, given that Vista was announced in plenty of time for drivers and software to work correctly. I'm not blaming anybody, I think the expectations of the consumers were not met.

I know ppl using P2 450's with 384mb of Ram running WinXP SP1 and they are happy with it.

What the hell does that have to do with the price of corn in Kansas? If people are buying new systems with current hardware, they're getting Vista.

I know people satisfied still running W98 on seven year-old systems; that doesn't make them the mainstream of the marketplace simply because they choose not to upgrade to anything approaching modern or current.

show me how much support is available for a 440bx chipset or an Nforce 2 chipset or hey what about an Nforce 3 chipset....... show me a computer running WinVista that has less than 512mb of ram and I'll show you an incredibly slow computer.

Why does M$ (or Apple, for that matter) have to design current, modern OSes--with all the demands (driven by consumers and ISVs) such an endeavor requires--with undue consideration given to hardware you've quoted? A 440BX chipset is almost ten years old! nForce3 is more than four years old! Dude, that's just idiocy.

You want to blame M$ for nVidia not supporting nForce3 on Vista, fine, be an idiot. With your mentality, we'd still be running P90s with 16MB of RAM and liking it.

"I love statistics.

OK, how many people are buying PCs these days dcompared to 5 years ago?

I love how advertsing agencies pull stats like this out o' their bottom. Why not state the adoption rate of the upgrade of Vista vs the adoption rate for XP upgrades.

Adding in figures that are tied to new PC and laptop sales is just stupid. Laptops today can be bought for $500. 5 years ago, $1000+? That whole supply/demand thing. If Dell sold two laptops, one with Vista for $1000 and the exact same thing with XP for $900, the average person would buy the XP model.

Stop looking at this metric as thoguh it's anything more than advertising. That's all it is. "

About twice as many PCs being sold, with Vista selling slightly more than twice as many copies in the same time as XP, IIRC. But you're ignoring that we were told by hordes of open source and apple users that vista was a FAILURE and NOBODY would use it, yet it's doing slightly better than the most popular OS ever, XP, it doesn't compute, but then again, it rarely does with these people. And Vista sold more in 5 weeks than non-MS OS's put together. I wonder if you would be so dismissive of the only science we have for understanding these things (statistics) if they said what you wanted to hear.

I also don't like some of the directions M$ is taking with certian parts. DRM being one of them.

Don't like DRM? Don't blame M$; that's courtesy of your friends at RIAA/MPAA.

Vista doesn't run the primary software that the company I work for uses.

In actual fact, I did a test with the RC2 of Vista 32-bit and disovered that around one-third of the software my company uses has a show-stopping issue with Vista, be it network-code, license-server, permissions, or plain old incompatible exe.

I'll re-evaluate it at service pack 1, once the first few thousand bugs have been ironed out. I'm sure as hell NOT spending two months talking to developers and getting workarounds for the issues for a dozen different CAD/CAM packages, only to then have to roll it out each time a new bug is found. TBH, that's what guinea-pigs are for, but I'd just rather someone else was the guinea-pig, hence the delay until SP1. Oddly, everything that worked on 2000 worked on XP, there were none of these problems in 2002

--
I find it odd too - I've always jumped on the new versions of windows and stayed with them, but in XP I've found an OS that actually doesn't need to do any more to keep me happy (for now). None of Vista's features really entice me to upgrade. I think it's because they're gimmicks rather than features. That mean's Vista's either ahead of its time, or MS are just expanding the OS for the sake of a product they can sell. Call me a cynic, but Vista smacks of the latter.

I've been using Vista for about 2 weeks.

The big improvements for me are:

- Firewall - Can block all outbound traffic except user-specified programs. Settings and permission rules can be saved to a file.

- Search - It's faster and easier.

- Unattended Installation - Easier, xml answer file, auto partitioning.

That's it. Not much, but I haven't lost anything by switching so I don't have a reason to go back to XP. Vista is a mediocre, flawed product but so was XP. Microsoft may have some good engineers but they don't have any good software designers.

Its simple really.If you are an MS hater(obviously plenty posting here)then DO NOT buy Vista.
Instead, restrict your self to trashing what you don't have,don't understand and don't want anyway....oh wait....you are already doing that....oops
If,on the other hand you want a cool upgrade to XP that is slick,more secure than any MS OS so far and has functionality and ease of use that makes XP look rather old and clunky then get yourself a retail copy of Vista and use it as your desktop for a few months.
Then have someone try to take it from you for your old copy of XP....

MIDI gets yet another amputation with Vista.
It's pretty sad that, when I finally found out what was my problem with a specific MIDI application in XP, the only solution is going back to 98. >_ > It hasn't been high on my priority list, but it is another reason why I'm not moving to Vista, period.

For those people complaining about everything M$, When was the last time you walked into a store and bought a stand alone upgrade for other operating systems like OSX? You guys should stop all these blah blah blah against microsoft. I sense all these criticisms are more about envy rather than concrete facts. The fact here is that M$ has SOLD nearly 40 million of Vistas. What i expected from you was great job M$. Now, let the bashing begin!

I still consider vista to be far superior in the 64 bit area. XP x64 edition just had so many problems on my machine.After installing Vista home premium x64 on my computer i have yet to have any issue at all...all drivers took in...i have yet to have any downgrade in performance. The people who i have installed vista on there computers also seem to be extremely happy with it. I have noticed that the 32 bit versions occasional have some odd things but still seems pretty stable.

everyone I know who's tried Vista has switched back citing incompatibility issues with alot of apps especially 3d modelling and tooling software, alot of hardware and reduced performance....... those that were forced have wound up formatting and installing WinXP in it's place.

a few ppl I know returned their Dell Laptops because Dell wouldn't give them XP in Vista's place..... then a few weeks later Dell is letting ppl choose XP over Vista so I have to believe the incident wasn't isolated to my area alone.

I've read that companies buying new computers are getting Vista by default then exchanging Vista for XP but MS still counts the sale to Vista.

seems like nothing more than smoke and mirror Public Relations lies.

Um, sorry if this comes out as trolling, but I thought all this stuff about Vista selling better than XP was debunked a long time ago as mostly an artifact of the larger overall size of the computer market compared to the size of the market when XP was released.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070412-will-vistas-real-sale...

I think it's great that they've pushed a lot of Vista copies out the door. The more users, the more complaints of incompatibilities. And the faster we'll get proper functioning drivers for our peripherals and patches for our software.

On a somewhat related note, does anyone out there work with Adobe products in Vista? Do the current versions of Acrobat or Photoshop work in Vista? The Adobe website makes it sound like they are incompatible and require a forthcoming patch.

Is that why Dell is bringing XP back to its machines? Good call.

well, as is customary, I'm awaiting my Vista DVD - about 4 months after release, I ordered it. Same was true with XP...and Tiger, for that matter...

Blah blah blah... show me the numbers of standalone copies sold, not what came bundled with computers.

Minus two systems from me. I just ordered two optiplexes with winxp from Dell.

Edit: meant as reply to #41

Adoption eh, guess because copies are abandoned ;)

But seriously. are there any number on how often people dump vista again compared to XP?

Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of all people know that.

<sarcasm>But, but, but how is this possible? I mean, everyone is supposed to be using Linux and OSX instead! And no one is successfully using/enjoying/developing/deploying on the Vista platform! This is undeniably true because no one I know personally is using Vista! How could they? I mean, doesn't everyone remember when the transition from Win9X to XP was totally seamless and without issue and we were all masturbating in the streets? And how can they sell 40 million licenses if I'm still using a 5-year old box for playing CounterStrike? </sarcasm >

Does no one read M$'s numbers for the quarter? $5 billion for the quarter--that's their profit, mind you. You can pretend everyone is thumbing their nose at Redmond and using Ubuntu or whatever other flavor of Linux is in at the moment, but that doesn't change reality.

I love statistics.

OK, how many people are buying PCs these days dcompared to 5 years ago?

I love how advertsing agencies pull stats like this out o' their bottom. Why not state the adoption rate of the upgrade of Vista vs the adoption rate for XP upgrades.

Adding in figures that are tied to new PC and laptop sales is just stupid. Laptops today can be bought for $500. 5 years ago, $1000+? That whole supply/demand thing. If Dell sold two laptops, one with Vista for $1000 and the exact same thing with XP for $900, the average person would buy the XP model.

Stop looking at this metric as thoguh it's anything more than advertising. That's all it is.

I got Vista 32-bit Premium Home Edition for my new Intel C2D 6600 build (my first Intel build, having always been an AMD builder) along with an 8800 GTS 640. Without going into a lot of details, I bought Vista primarily to play and tinker with, thinking it would not be ready for prime time, and that I would mostly stick with XP. Well lo and behold, within a week Vista became the primary OS. It has been rock steady, and many older games that my 9 year-old son enjoys, like Midtown Madness 2 and Motocross Madness 2, run perfectly. And while some of my benchmark scores are a tad slower, my apps including Flight Sim X and Office XP run fine (except for Outlook). Overall, very accepting of every program I've thrown at it so far. I'm far from being a MS fanboy, but hey, give credit when it's due. Once they finally tweak the UAC a bit more, it will be really great.

The above said, I found Vista 64-bit to be not so ready for prime time.

Work? Go ahead and get Vista all you want.
Home? I'd never pay for it, and I'm too old for the piracy crap. I think I'd even reject a machine given to me for home use with Microsoft OS's on them.
Supporting other people? Microsoft Operating systems always bring in the hourly $$$. Always have, always will.

I've been happy with the copy preinstalled on my Toshiba notebook. I've had absolutely no problems with it. If I could I would name both of my future children Vista. Ok maybe that quite that far, but you get the point......I like it.

Microsoft's recent attempt at legal action against open source community are speaking in a different language.