Microsoft wants you to stop using Windows XP. Badly. How badly? They’ll actually give you fifty bucks right now to replace your outdated XP machine.
The push is on to move everyone they possibly can away from XP before pulling the plug on security updates once and for all. Microsoft knows it’s been a great decade-plus for XP, but they’re doing everything they can to get people to upgrade to a supported OS “before it’s too late.” April 8th is the day the patches stop coming.
Microsoft has a few other carrots to dangle, too. If a $50 credit for the Microsoft store was enough to pique your interest, but you’re nervous about making the switch, they’re also offering 90 days of premium support at no extra charge. You can call and chat 24 hours a day if you want, and if you’ve been living with XP that long you might feel like you need that kind of assistance to figure out Windows 8.
There are also plenty of nice Windows desktops and laptops on sale in the Store. You can pick up a touchscreen notebook for as little as $249 — not a high-end one, but plenty of machine for just over $140 more than it would cost to buy Windows 8.1 in a retail box. If you’re looking for a tablet, the 32GB Dell Venue 8 Pro has been marked down to $229 (maybe use the $50 GC to pick yourself up a nice keyboard for it).
And the best part? None of the systems Microsoft sells in their online or brick-and-mortar stores has any of that annoying bloatware you find on retail boxed machines that other big-name stores are selling.
Will the promo actually get anyone to dump XP? Maybe, but since the $50 rebate doesn’t require any kind of proof (like an old XP CD-key) to be provided, the impact will probably be fairly minimal. $229 or $249 is still more than $0, and that’s what some XP users feel like spending on a new computer.
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