A recent article in APC Magazine finds a marketing manager for HP detailing how business users are still able to order machines pre-loaded with Windows XP while making it appear that the OS sold was Windows Vista.
Jane Bradburn of HP Australia says,
“From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today.”
So the business customer gets an XP machine but it appears on the books as a Vista license. Microsoft is aiming to make Windows XP completely unavailable by January of next year, but HP is apparently “already in discussions with Microsoft about how it could push this deadline back” because the feedback that HP’s been getting from businesses is that most of them don’t have time to do compatibility testing and the cost of re-imaging all their machines is too high during the slow economy.