Gaz

Microsoft: Chinese Remain Sanguine About XP Expiration

Hit the nail on the head with this artical, being in China so long though it feels strange to have someone state the obvious about it, I keep on forgetting that people outside of China sometimes buy real copies of windows :)

I personally use Debian (Linux), but I do not know A SINGLE Chinese person using Vista. I know some that tried it and went back to XP, but no one seems to actually be using it. The main problem is that Vista doesn't quite work properly for Chinese programs like QQ.

On the same note, in my 4 years of being in China and spending 2 years of that in the IT industry, I have not seen a single PC running a real copy of any version of Windows, not even once. It's practically impossible to buy a real copy in most of China anyway. Perhaps some fancy upmarket IT stores in Shanghai have real copies for sale (as a status symbol only), but apart from that good luck finding a real copy of windows in China.

They even have their own 'versions' of windows XP - I bought Ghost XP last week, it puts a ghost image of a working install on your computer and then updates the hardware, and installs commonly used programs such as office and photoshop etc.