Dell charging some customers $50 to downgrade from Vista

Dell won some much-deserved praise for announcing recently that it would continue to offer Windows XP on some of its computers even after Microsoft's June 30 end-of-life date for the operating system, pretty clearly telling the world that the relationship with its customers were more important than its relationship with Redmond.

Apparently that relationship comes at a price, though: If you're a Dell Vostro user, downgrading to XP from Vista will actually cost you quite a bit more. $50, to be exact. Though that's still a huge discount off the $300 list price of an XP Professional disc, it's annoying considering the price you're already paying for Vista if you don't plan to use it.

Various versions of Vista and certain classes of customers are offered "downgrade rights" as part of the Vista license, which legally let you drop back to XP without paying extra. Dell has said it will continue to offer the downgrade option until 2009. On most of Dell's systems, the downgrade is free.

Vostro owners are out of luck, alas, though I suppose Dell would defend the fee as a service charge for the additional work it takes to put XP on these systems. (That's a real stretch, in my mind: Computer builders "image" systems in bulk and don't actually have to go through the process of installing Vista normally, then downgrading it to XP.)

Vostro was most recently in the news when it was revealed that certain UK models had misconfigured keyboards.

LINK: Dell charging $50 for Vista-to-XP downgrade