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Summer break for educational facility usually means a break for staff/students, but is a bustling time to prepare tech for the coming school year. Since new education workstation purchases usually occur during the summer, 2008 is unique - especially if you would like to maintain your environment that already exists with Windows XP. Since we are normally more concerned with getting things accomplished with Open Source Software, this article might be more useful for others. However, many end users are already standardized on XP, so lets focus on keeping that running smoothly without impacting licensing.

This article from PC World does a great job at breaking down the current state of the union of XP. Basically, the public has been presented with:
Windows XP will no longer be available for purchase from Microsoft for general retail and OEM partners as of June 30, 2008

Curious about this statement, we contacted a vendor (who happens to be Dell for this instance). It was interesting to know that their OEM education/government sector has a relationship with Microsoft which can change daily. Thus, a firm answer cannot be had. The only way to ensure your order will ship with XP is to call your sales rep and have them check.

Based on the article above, there are various ways to getting around the June 30th cutoff. One of them is the “Vista downgrade,” which could be the failsafe way to order OEM during June. It appears that ongoing support and patches will be carrying on until 2014, so no need to panic. Happy ordering.