Dell, in an effort to regain favor with consumers, has made it possible for home users to one again buy computers running Windows XP or XP Professional. Dell and a lot of other hardware manufacturers pushed Vista pretty hard, but after months of consumer complaints (and probably massive amounts of tech support on Dell's part) XP is available again. Right now XP will be sold on select models, namely the Dimension E520/E521 and on Inspiron 1501, E1405, E1505, and E1705 according to their blog. Dell's main site states that XP can be had on certain XPS M1710 notebooks as well. The situation got a lot of attention on the company's IdeaStorm site where many interested consumers spoke up and asked for XP back.

The company is obviously not thrilled with the how this worked out and posted a great chart comparing Vista to XP. Apparently XP, when compared to Vista, totally sucks! I put together a few models and it looks like the price for XP Home is the same as that of Vista Home Basic. So the starting price of the E1505 with either basic OS would be $699. For XP Professional it is a $149 upgrade where with Vista you can upgrade to Business for $99 or Ultimate for $199. Anyway, it's nice to see Dell working with their home users in this fashion. A lot of times people have to just take what's offered to them (or move to a different company) while Dell is much more cooperative with its business customers, but given the tough times they are going through right now a few moves like this could really them them along.