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How Much Does a Vista Upgrade Cost?
dptalia writes "Microsoft has rolled out its Vista upgrade program, where people can buy a qualifying PC with XP today and upgrade to Vista later for free. This article talks about what free really means. Some companies, such as Dell, charge $45 for converting to Vista Home from XP home. And then comes the question of actually trying to upgrade your computer... Is "free" really worth it?"
This is just a little fan on the flames to convince hold-outs (as others have correctly indicated in this thread). Once Vista begins shipping, it will be installed ubiquitously on nearly all comodity machines and the influence on the bottom line of the cost will be, for the most part, unaffected.
Why bother.
I use FreeBSD at work, because it's the best OS for servers.
I deal with Windows, Exchange, Office, because my employer will bear the costs.
When I shell out my own money for a new machine, I buy an Apple. I pay money to never have to write this story. I am fortunate to have the money to do that (not that it's a huge premium), but I love being able to buy a new machine and well, start using it immediately to do useful work. It even helps me migrate from my old machine in a useful way. In minutes.
As always. The point isn't to go out and start buying WinXP PC-s so to get free Vista.
The point is if you need to buy a PC, you don't need to wait for Vista, but buy it now with XP, and get Vista later for free.
As you probably imagine, quite a lot of people are holding hardware purchases, waiting for Vista pre-installed machines. What Microsoft does is keep the market going versus stifle sales right during the Holiday season.
In fact, it's a very sweet deal if you ask me, since Vista is gonna be crap until SP1, and you get to enjoy worry free XP experience until Vista is stable: then upgrade for $0. Best of both worlds.
I really do think that Vista will be the beginning of the end for Microsoft as a major player in the OS wars. There are subtle signs that they are starting to lose. Not commmercially -- not yet -- but their pricing and licensing models no longer work. I would have thought that even they were finally coming to realize this, but their pricing, licensing, and marketing (4 major versions) of Vista says otherwise.
I expect Windows to hang around for a long while yet, but I expect that this is where it will begin to actually decline. Their business and marketing models have been pushed past the point at which their products will continue to carry them: they have no technology advantages anymore (most of those they had before, they bought or stole), they are pricing themselves out of the market, and they have been making both installation and use of their products more difficult rather than easier. The only advantage they have had has been a stranglehold on market share and thus hardware vendors, but they have begun to lose that leverage as well. Given their heavy-handed (and monopolistic according to the courts) business practices, I doubt many people will really suffer very much from their passing. After all... their major competition is actually free.
One thing I leaned about computers:
Buy the stuff best for you TODAY.
With the rate at which computer stuff progresses, paying extra for future upgrade is almost never worth the price. By the time you want to upgrade, it costs almost as much as buying a whole new setup, more complicated, and even after upgrade, it'll be far inferior to a whole new setup.
Computer lifecycle is not like TVs in the 50's (or even 80's or 90's). Trust me - I have old P5s and Sparc pizza boxes that I use as router and file server, but the electricity and space they take up costs me more than the prices of new low-end boxes (hence I'll be dumping them shortly - eh, I'll keep the pizza boxes for nostalgia).
research.microsoft.com for internal innovations. I watched "RingCam" become RoundeTable, a commercially viable, innovative video conferencing. I am a competitor and will crush them in this arena, but we don't complain and then copy what they do 5 years later.
As for a lesson in how the world works, most innovations in big companies are acquired. It's cheaper to watch 10 startups and follow what the market wants, realize which approach will work then buy them, as opposed to gambling/putting a stake in the ground and hope yours wins. Sometimes the latter is the correct approach, but that's the exception, not the rule. So why complain that Microsoft buys companies? Why not instead get a good idea, start your own company and get bought? Or do you just want to copy what others are doing and give it away for free?
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
How exactly is it "10 years behind what the market demands"? If the marked demands an operating system for those who can't even figure out how to use a word processor, or can barely write an e-mail without asking for help, maybe we don't want to fill that need. For those who are willing to put some effort into thought, and probably an extra five minutes every week or so, there's the Ubuntu series, and there's the series derived from Red Hat Linux.
If the market continues to fill demands for those who put in no effort, then fewer will put in effort, and soon the operating system will do the thinking for the average consumer.
If the market demands hardware support, community operating systems can't be blamed, since the vendors rarely provide any sort of support, while they write complete drivers for the ubiquitous operating systems. Have they ever thought that if they fixed the compatibility issue, that more people would flock to operating systems of less previous popularity? If the market demands fancy eye-candy, there are implementations of such "features" that have been around for years, as certain operating systems' features stagnated. Due to the aforementioned circumstances, people haven't really seen the superfluous features that have been added to the alternatives.
Most vendors don't support 'community' operating systems due to a lack of money for software provided. One could argue that since these operating systems are free, no money could ever come in to spur interest. This isn't the case; any consumer, regardless of computer background, is willing to pay for good, or ubiquitous, software. This just hasn't been realized by most. However, due to the money with the most ubiquitous operating systems, people will continue to feed this trend, and the market will continue to serve such people.
The situation is pretty hopeless, isn't it?
I find it so weird that Wintendo-fanboys always have the following attitude:
... oh wait, you DO need those to download your patches and drivers... Since that is not painless either, well, it's your hardware, not a problem with Windows.
Of course your Linux boots up and everything works dandy but then you have to install the proprietary drivers from the hardware vendors because they don't want to release some information about what fits where in the register and how to call certain functions so you can play your favorite games with faster 3D acceleration. Since that is not painless, it's an inherent problem with Linux, not the proprietary hardware you bought.
Of course Windows doesn't come with all those drivers pre-loaded, you have to install them yourself. That your keyboard or mouse or network card (and there's a bunch out there that don't work vanilla) isn't working on startup isn't relevant, you don't need to use those to
My idea: buy an open source supportive or supported video card, they're out there. Run any vanilla linux and it will work right-out-of-the-box. Or buy a Mac, all your proprietary stuff that works right out of the box. Or buy a combination of proprietary hardware and linux and get the hassle of typing 2 lines on command line to get NVidia drivers working or buy a proprietary operating system with a half-ass Dell and spend the next 3 days setting up your system or buy an utterly old system from the year 2001 where XP should have all drivers for and spend only 1 day installing patches, upgrades, virusses and reboots.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I have a very can do attitude when it comes to Vista. As in, I can do without Vista.
I have learned from my past mistakes what the upgrade treadmill problems are.
I was running DOS. On top of that I installed Windows 3.1. On top of that I installed the Windows 95 Upgrade (the one without IE included) and installed IE as a seprate program. This process took several years and went through several hardware upgrades such as memory, hard drive, and later motherboard and CPU. Each re-instalation was a major pain. I learned quickly never to do upgrade upon upgrade again. It just takes too long. Windows 98 was a replacement, not an upgrade on top.
What I learned is the upgrade is nice IF the upgrade is a replacement, not an upgrade that requires a prior qualifying product to be already installed.
In a nutshell. If the upgrade is a stand alone fresh install, that if fine. Doing an install and then doing an install, and then doing an install... Forget it. You will regret it on your first hard drive replacement.
So.. To properly answer the question.. I need to know what kind of upgrade we are talking about. Does it do a fresh install, or does it require the prior qualified (auth per WGA perhaps) version installed? I would hate to do the recovery from a dead hard drive to include install, configure networking for phone home, patch, WGA auth, install service packs, upgrade, re auth with WGA, install applications such as MS office, re auth with WGA, etc.
To repeat the question, Will the upgrade install on a bare new hare drive or does it need a pre-qualified install of the prior version? Using the Genuine Windows sticker number is not a problem. Doing an endless install on install is a problem.
The truth shall set you free!
The reason your machine has 32-bit XP is because Microsoft made the (misguided, in my opinion) to make XP-64 require 64 bit drivers, and your favorite dollar-store device doesn't come with one. Had they implemented some facility for for XP64 to use 32-bit drivers, we'd all be using it by now.
How does Vista change this?
Some non-free Linux distros (eg Mandriva Powerpack) do come with official nvidia drivers. Does XP?
just like XP, IF you needed it. For office work and simple games the Linux GPL drivers are just fine.
Same for sound.
Er no actually. Most of the GPL drivers for most sound chips are perfectly adequate.
Apparently so. You do know most Linux distros will also install drivers for printers, scanners, analogue TV cards and now Digital TV cards during installation. Seen that on XP too? I haven't. And heck people even forget, even XP didnt have a basic DVD player ready after installation. You had to get the vendor video card drivers or very recent media player. Mandriva now has LinDVD.
Why are Slashdot folks, and why is IT in general, so negative and pessimistic?
Experience, mostly. After having been lied to, screwed, blued and tatooed you get cynical. You get handed crap and are expected to make it work. You are seen as a cost center, when your contributions can be very useful to an organization. Managers insist on treating IT as a factory assembly line 'reach for the lowest common denominator' type job when it is a knowledge based skill based job.
When POS vendor hardware or software fail, the vendor blames the IT department. When the IT department is incompetent, they blame the vendor.
You give everything, weekends, relationships, holidays, mental and physical health and then get laid off anyway. See also http://www.adminspotting.org/
And MS is one of the worst. They promise it is easy. And it is easy, if you don't actually want to solve any serious problems. It's OK for for a few minmal classes of problems (web shopping cart, hierarchial accounting system) but not so great for actual business problems. The reason so much COBOL is still out there is that most programmers still haven't progressed far from COBOL.
ERPs are great, if you can change your business practices to fit the ERP. Which is totaly backwards, the software is developed to fit the business, not vice versa. Consultants for the ERP de jour swoop in, pick up fat pay checks and then leave the IT departments to hold the bag.
There is no good reason for Vista. Windows server 2003 and XP could serve for another 20 years under a nice incremental improvement process. But no, MS is going to once again pull the rug out from under us. A whole new class of security holes, new libraries, new incompatibilies and if you were dumb enough to pay for certs, a whole new set of certs. SQL Server 2000 was around for about 7 years, that gives you a reasonsable ROI. Changing every 2-3 years leaves you no ROI as by the time things stabilise, you have to change again.
I'm done. 9 months from now I will be in another field. Have fun, suckers....
(Damn, 3 glasses of wine and I am ranting and raving. I am getting cranky in my old age...)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Here's the thing: There's a lot more companies that use software, as opposed to companies that make and sell software. If a company buys a piece of software from another company for $1000 it increases the GDP by $1000. If they get similar piece of software for free, then GDP does not increase. But in both cases the user receives the benefits of the software. So is GDP accurate measure here? Why is it considered a good thing when money moves from one pocket to another pocket?
Why is it a good thing that large number of companies are spending huge amounts of money of software-licenses? Wouldn't it be better if those companies could get the software for free, and they could then use the money they saved on something else instead? You stare at the amount of sales that are related to software. But the money involved in those sales is taken from someone, and given to someone else. I see no inherint value in that if you could just keep the money and still get the software. Software-companies might be harmed to some extent, but the USERS of software would benefit trendemously.
As to your analogy on photographs... Well, in software we have this thing called "patents". You can't patent a picture of a sunset and then sue everyone else taking and sharing pictures of sunsets. In software, you could do just that. Also, you could look at pictures from several different photographers, you can't do that in software. We have handful of companies that control their stuff with iron fist, and give you EULA's that are 20 pages long, telling you what rights they reserve to themselves (usually all of them), and what you are denied to do. There really is a world of difference between photography and software, and your analogy is lame. What would you think if you had to sign a long and complicated agreement before you could see a photograph? What if you took a picture of a sunset, knowing that some other photographer could sue you because of that?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
In all honesty, though, what would retailers do about it? Ditch Microsoft and start shipping PC's with Linspire?
Why should an operating system require effort? Computers are supposed to do work for us, not the other way round.
You can say what you want about microsoft but at least they don't tell you to upgrade the kernel or compile modules when you want to install some hardware.
Your answer is at http://www.apple.com/
There, fixed. Next!
Better times? Less compatibility, more bloat, the virus they call DRM. How is that better? And at a higher price of $$ and time whos is this better? M$ is the standing king of "Nothing New Invented Here". Stay away, if you know what's good for you. Use XP with Symantec AV and Adaware it works just fine and runs EVERYTHING for windows!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.