Bowing to pressure from customers and computer makers, Microsoft plans to keep Windows XP around a little longer.

Large PC manufacturers were slated to have to stop selling XP after January 31. However, they have successfully lobbied Microsoft to allow them to continue selling PCs with all flavors of Windows XP preloaded until June 30, a further five months. Microsoft also plans to keep XP on retail shelves longer and will allow computer makers in emerging markets to build machines with Windows XP Starter Edition until June 2010.

With Microsoft's blessing PC makers have launched programs that allow new PC buyers to downgrade their Vista Business and Vista Ultimate machines to Windows XP.

In April, Dell acknowledged continued XP demand and resumed offering XP as an option on new systems. In July, Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell ratcheted up the percentage of OS sales the company expects XP to account for in fiscal year 2008 from 15 percent to 22 percent. Finally, in August, Microsoft announced an XP Service Pack 2c release that does nothing more than add new Windows XP product keys so the company can keep selling the OS to businesses through January 31, 2009.

In addition, customers who purchase a Vista machine from Dell can use a vendor-supplied XP Pro Recovery Disk to replace the Vista operating system on their system with XP Pro.