(no subject)

[rivka]

I finally got an account number for my new grant!

That means that I get to start buying stuff now. Like computers. We've been anxiously hovering over our e-mail, waiting to hear from the Business Office, because the word is that starting June 1st you won't be able to buy a PC with Windows XP on it anymore. And I'm damned if I'm going to run Vista.

On my shopping list: a desktop and a laptop for me. A desktop for Steve, who is my right-hand man on this grant. 24-inch monitors for both of us. I've got $3000 budgeted for "office supplies" - that buys an awful lot of file folders and pens. Let's see... a cashbox. Thumb drives. Software? A fun twirly office-supplies organizer? Some of the supplies money will have to go for postage, thanks to a fairly ridiculous IRB call.

I have no idea how to spend $3000 on office supplies. What a lovely problem to have.

(Sorry, don't mind me. This is the first time I've ever had untrammelled purchasing power, and it's going to my head a bit.)

Comments

[telerib.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere on the 'Net that there's some clause or other which allows certain computer hardware manufacturers to keep including Windows XP on the computers. It's *along with* Vista, but what folks do is take the thing out of the box, remove the Vista and install the XP.

(But if your problem is that UMD is going to Vista, then this is of no use.)

I feel dumb - I got a new laptop when my old one died, and didn't remove the Vista. Now I have the Vista versions of three or four important pieces of software that I use, which makes me reluctant to go back. Vista's annoying, but not sufficiently so to make me tear it out by the roots and sow the hard drive with salt. But I do wish I'd just stuck with XP.

[brooksmoses]

Yes. Sufficiently fancily-named versions of Vista (Business and Ultimate, IIRC, which I may or may not) come with a clause in the license that gives back-version rights, which means that it gives you the right to run XP on the machine if you have an install disk for it.

(With my last office computer, I was in a similar position with Windows 2003 -- which I didn't want, but which had replaced Windows 2000 in our ordering list. So I got a Windows 2003 license and a Windows 2000 install disk through our purchasing department, and everything was happy.)

Reportedly, Dell will be selling computers with the installation process and so forth for this already done. The article I read said that they hadn't yet figured out how to tweak their ordering system to deal with the clause from Microsoft that means they can only do this if the customer explicitly requests it first, but I presume they'll solve that pretty quickly if/when it becomes an issue.