Re: Upgrades, downgrades & a general mess
It's simple. They purchase the Enterprise edition of XP with X number of
licenses for the site (Open License). Same activation key for all the
boxes. Contact your software vendor and ask about it.
The problem you are having is going to occur more and more with new
computers. The new hardware will not have XP compatible drivers available
since the device developers aren't going to write drivers for old operating
systems and people are going to be forced to purchase an upgrade (if
available) to their application software to run on the newer systems if it
is not compatible with Vista OS. I have seen instances of this when IE 7
for XP came out. It was not compatible with a VPN program that a large
business in my community was using. The VPN program is very expensive to
upgrade for the limited software budget of the company so they can't use IE7
or Vista on any of their systems.
"DBme" <DBme@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5C09EE1B-20CB-44D3-A12E-74276F5603AC@microsoft.com...
> For reasons beyond our ability to fathom, the boss bought 5 new PC's from
> Dell with Vista on them. After finding out that half the software in the
> world and almost ALL of our software won't run on Vista, we contacted Dell
> to
> try to find out about downgrading to XP. We might as well have called and
> said "My talking book uncle monkey hat." It's Pointless! It's Usless!
> It's Dell!
>
> We went out & bought 4 copies of XP pro which we manged to load with
> agreat
> deal of problems (Dell Driver Hell) and now all four computers are giving
> us
> a 28 day countdown to activation.
>
> Even if we bite the bullet and start upgrading all our systems to XP,
> we're
> ALWAYS loading & reloading software & swapping motherboards and trying to
> stay ahead of 32 of the dumbest end users on the planet -- there is NO WAY
> we
> can keep track of what number goes with what motherboard, where, when &
> how
> we've had to change something. So my question is this: How is this
> handled
> by people who have hundreds or thousands of computers?