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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.
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.
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.
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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!
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+