THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Two other facts stood out when I looked more closely at the data.

• One is that a staggering 27% of small business customers are opting for either Windows XP Home or Vista Home Basic, even though both are terrible OS choices for any networked business. The implication is that the $100+ difference between the Home and Pro/Business versions is significant for price-conscious business buyers. By contrast, only 13% of buyers in the consumer category are choosing the XP Home/Vista Home Basic option.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=349#comments

Or it's that the online page is confusing? Or that the cheapest models are selling these Home versions?  You have to go to higher priced lines of both Dell and HP to get the Business versions of the Operating Systems.

One thing I noted when buying two Vista computers online from the HP store recently is that the HP online store definitely is klunkier than the Dell one.  But for everyone's hand wringing over not being able to find XP's the models that I have coming shortly, it was quite easy to get the Vista Business with XP downgrade rights.  Mind you I don't plan to exercise those rights, but I just ordered it to see what the media experience is like.  I also have several Vista Enterprise licenses so as to kick the computers up to versions that can support Bitlocker.

Conversely as easy as it was for me to find the Vista with XP downgrade rights offered, it's been harder to find an aftermarket quad monitor video card that has shipped in the box Vista drivers.  I'm finding that the Vista drivers are on the web, so it's not that they aren't available, just that in the packaging that ships with the units, they are still listed as 2000 or XP.  So I was finding I had to flip back and forth between newegg and the vendor driver download site to ensure that the quad monitor card I was buying had a Vista driver.