My favorite netbook of 2008 is now a few bucks cheaper. HP cut the price of the Mini 1000 to $359 over the weekend. It’s certainly not the cheapest netbook on the block, but let’s wait and see what HP does with their MIE version. It was, after all, $20 cheaper than the XP version when it was first announced. There’s also a bump to 1GB of RAM on the XP Mini 1000 on top of the price cut.

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The ever-sassy Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is pointing out that Apple is essentially lying like Satan lied to man about the cancer-causing potency of high-fructose corn syrup. In “Bean Counter,” for example, Apple suggests that Microsoft spends more on advertising than on “fixing Vista.” Adrian tells the honest truth:

For each $1 of sales Apple spends:

– 1.9 cents on Advertising
– 3.3 cents on R&D

For each $1 of sales Microsoft spends:

– 2.6 cents on Advertising
– 13.9 cents on R&D

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Read this line and you’ll understand how Joe Wilcox (and pretty much everyone else online) over at eWeek feels about Windows Vista:

Vista is headed to as quick a death as Microsoft can give it. Someday soon, some gun-toting Microsoft executive will lead Vista out back and “Pop!”

Screaming “Vista sucks!” is by no means a novel idea, but Wilcox uses, you know, evidence to support his claim, that Vista is dead to Microsoft. For example, Microsoft didn’t bleat endlessly about Vista licenses sold during last week’s earnings call. Is that because sales are down, or because sales weren’t as impressive at last quarter?

There’s also netbooks, the tiny half-laptops that, for whatever reason, people are snapping up. Needless to say, RAM- and graphics-hungry Vista doesn’t exactly run well on netbooks, which is why so manufacturers offer XP or Linux in lieu of Vista. If Microsoft can’t sell its fancy operating system to manufacturers of netbooks, where is growth going to come from, Mars?

This is why, by the way, Microsoft is so bullish on Windows 7—ignore that whole Vista thing, ’twas but a minor setback.

There was a time that a salesman actually needed to have enough skill, or knowledge, to sell a product — not both though. Circuit City got away from salesman way back in 2003, and now they are further enhancing their minions with some tablet PCs. EDGE, which creatively stands for Enhanced Digital Guide Experience, was created with customer in mind, but to be used by the associates on Windows XP-powered tablets.

Let’s dive into the press release.

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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.

Former CGer and current PopMecher took this photo of a huge public display sporting a big fat XP login. It’s escpecially grand that this is in the United Red Carpet lounge. Nothing’s too good for frequent fliers, even failing to implement Windows in Kiosk mode.

Okay, here’s what happened. Microsoft took a group of 120 individuals who “were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista” and who rated their perception of Vista at less than a five on a scale of one to ten. These people were shown a demo of what they thought was a new Windows OS called “Mojave” and this demo was individually tailored to each person based on “the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews.”

While the average rating of Vista before the demo was 4.4, the post-demo rating was 8.5, even though Mojave was actually Windows Vista. So what can we learn from all this? Vista looks nice. Problem is, none of these people had to use Vista. They were just “given a demo by a trained retail salesperson.”

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Bill Veghte from the Windows group at Microsoft sent out a nice big memo to those who still haven’t installed Vista in their enterprises and are waiting for some real improvement before they even consider it. His advice?

Windows Vista offers significant advances in security and productivity and we recommend that enterprises that have not yet deployed it should absolutely evaluate its benefits. If you looked at Windows Vista previously and had concerns, the combination of Service Pack 1 and improvements made by our partners probably fixed many of the issues you were worried about and we encourage you to take a second look.

Translation: Spend more man-hours poring over our software. We’ll wait!
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Tiny XP [Warning: Porn ads] is a stripped down yet simultaneously beefed up version of XP that includes almost all the drivers necessary to run on almost any hardware as well as a number of registry hacks that ensure that the install won’t bog things down.

Is it legal? No, but it’s basically a sysadmin’s godsend. It even includes a tiny copy of Linux for boot-time troubleshooting. “Tool” implementations like this have been around for years and their absolutely crucial for regular troubleshooting. It’s actually interesting: this version basically acts like a powerful Linux install, once the go-to tool for most sysadmins. How the worm has turned.

InfoWorld has a somewhat long-ish article about how to beat the drop-dead date for Windows XP sales, which Microsoft has set as June 30th of this year. That’s in less than a month! What to do?! Well, here are a couple of options.

First, June 30th is the last date that Windows XP can be sold. However, retailers and manufacturers can still sell copies of XP to the public and/or load copies of XP onto computers after that date, they just won’t be able to buy more copies of XP from Microsoft once stock runs out. So you’ll probably see retail stores and PC makers buying up copies of XP this month, lots and lots of copies.

Second, manufacturers have the option to provide downgrade rights to customers who buy new computers that would normally be pre-loaded with Vista. Dell is apparently offering downgrade rights until January 31st of next year and HP will be offering downgrade rights until July 30, 2009. So for many custom-built PCs, you’ll have the option of loading them up with XP instead of Vista.

Like the episode of The Office where Michael shows up uninvited to Jim’s barbeque, Microsoft has shown up at the netbook party, thrown its coat to the Temp, and grabbed the Karaoke microphone.

A recent press release says the following.

“Customers and partners have made it clear to us that they want Windows on their netbooks and nettops,” said Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of the Original Equipment Manufacturer Division at Microsoft. “We are committed to providing Windows solutions for these devices, helping to ensure a high-quality experience for both our partners and customers.”

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Since HP can’t seem to make the SP3 patch for XP work with its AMD procs, Microsoft has blocked these computers from getting the free update from Windows Update.

The bug affected AMD-based computers that were getting updates for Intel-based computers on accident, notable those made by HD. This would cause endless rebooting as the machines couldn’t utilize the downloaded software.

No word from MS on when updates for the AMD-based computers will be out, but we’re hoping shortly.

All the craziness going on with XP’s SP3 and AMD processors is complex, but Microsoft wants you to know it’s not their fault, it’s HP’s fault, among others.

It turns out that the OEMs, including HP, have been installing the wrong sysprep before XP, using an sysprep designed for Intel’s platform. So it’s not a Microsoft issue, or an AMD issue, it’s a configuration issue.

There’s no patch yet, though Microsoft is working on the problem. We’ll let you know when there’s a fix.

Microsoft has unveiled a plan under which a somewhat crippled version of XP will be made available to the makers of low-cost PCs like the Eee PC and XO laptop. I’m not sure how I feel about this; at $25 it’s practically free, but the arbitrary hardware limitations Microsoft is imposing are, I think, kind of despicable:

the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs…the systems can have no more than 1G byte of RAM and a single-core processor running at no more than 1GHz.

Really? Single core? No touchscreens? Limiting the damn screen size? What Microsoft has just done is make sure that the most advanced UMPCs and low-cost computers won’t be running Windows. They’re trying to set up the low-cost PC as a separate market, and so it is, but they can’t simple draw a box around the hardware and say “fit this.” It’s not their job. And I really don’t think the Eee PC is going to cannibalize Vista sales, guys, so don’t worry about it.

I have no doubt this will grease the wheels and get more low-cost PCs to market and to the people who need them in developing countries, but at the same time it’s very much Microsoft playing 800-lb gorilla.