Vista Family Discount Keys Found Not Compatible

acousticiris writes "Many (if not all) users who took advantage of Microsoft's Vista Family Discount have been issued invalid installation keys and cannot install Windows Vista Home Premium. Microsoft says, 'There is no expected time period for a fix at this time.' According to the article, the keys are valid for something, just not Windows Vista. Perhaps it's just too simple to issue these folks new keys and send them on their way."

Comments

Re:Upgrade does not include Vista Premium..

[Agelmar]

Actually, I think you are the one who misunderstands.

The program is basically this: If you bought a retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate, you can buy two additional upgrade licenses for $50 each. These upgrade licenses are for Windows Vista Home Premium - i.e. you don't get two more Ultimate licenses, you get 2 home premium upg licenses. Hence the bit about home premium.

Mod parent up; GP down

[SEMW]

Amazing how many people mod up things that *sound* well-informed, as long as they're in a condensending or sarcastic manner ("Some users just cannot read..."), whether they're factually correct or not.

Re:Not Surprised...

[westlake]

Just more of the same. It only took three weeks for them to provide a new release rather than new keys.
YMMV, but I doubt it.

It's just another non-story, another chance for the geek to vent his rage against the universe. Vista has moved into the home market, where its dominance is as certain as the rising of the sun:

You have to wonder how long the crowd here will continue grasping at straws:

I just tested this out for myself. If you received a free copy of Vista from your participation in the beta program, the Ultimate key you were issued qualifies for the Windows Vista Family Discount. How's THAT for a discount!

Now, if only they could issue correct PID keys for the Home Premium installations...

Speaking of which, if you were issued a bad key, just install Vista without it. When it asks for the Product Key, just select "Next", then chose "Home Premium" as your edition, and continue as usual. Then, when Microsoft sends you the right key, you can add it to your system. Vista Beta Reward Product Keys and the Vista Family Discount

Re:Paid customers getting the shaft?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Kay, this is from MacSlash, so obviously it has a bit of Mac slant to it. However, the story seems to check out and what's worse is the account how Microsoft handles the problem. What a horrible company.

MS has a Family Program, where if you buy a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (the high end version), you can then also purchase up two two licenses of Windows Vista Home Premium at $50 each for additional machines in your home using a special web site. This is only offered for those who purchase their copy of Vista Ultimate through a retail channel.

I purchased the Ultimate copy via Amazon for my Macbook Pro at work ($400) and then when I got home, I purchased one additional license ($50) for Home Premium through the Microsoft web site for my iMac at home. That's $450 that I gave Microsoft.

The online sale went fine and I was issued a license key for my second machine. The problem was that the key didn't work. I re-entered and double-checked it at length with no luck. Time to go to support. In the email I received it had a web link to follow if you need help, so I clicked. It goes to a non-existant page at microsoft.com, and still does today.

So, next I called the toll-free number in the email. It turns out that this is a Microsoft number, but for a different project. The person who answered my call was unusually candid with me. The poor people working at that number were not equipped for the deluge of calls they were receiving. They were not even supposed to be getting these calls. They had not been trained themselves on how to use Vista yet and had no idea what to do to remedy the problem. He told me that they've been getting "thousands" of calls all day long for this very same issue and that he can confirm for me that the keys being generated by the web site are not working for anyone.

He said all he could do was to take my name and number, which he wrote down on physical paper to deliver to his supervisor (I thought Microsoft had email, silly me). He said they were trying to get the attention of someone "higher in the food chain" to do something about it - or at least shut down the offending web page that's issuing the invalid keys. He told me he hoped that someone would get back to me "within a few days" and that he's very sorry but has nothing more to offer.

Microsoft does not offer refunds for purchases made through their web site and they are sticking to that policy, leaving users like me who already paid them hundreds of dollars with no recourse and unable to affect the remedy to this horrible situation.

On the very day that an OS is released that's been in development for half a decade, the least I expect is that their ordering systems are working correctly and their staff is properly prepared.

This has one again reinforced my impression of Microsoft as being an unresponsive company that makes crap software.

and a follow up from another poster:

Last night, I received an email from MS Support. The person sending it was telling me that she is taking "ownership" of my case and provided me her direct email address. Finally, I thought, I'm getting somewhere.

Having heard nothing more, this morning I sent her an email asking for the status of my case. No response yet. I sent another around lunchtime, still no response. So, this afternoon, I phoned them back at the number given to me in the email last night.

I was horrifed to find out that MS claims my case is closed and resolved! They transferred me to someone who could open my case back up for me, and then back to Customer Service. Being unable to help me, Customer Service transferred me to Tech Support.

After explaining the whole story from scratch again, t

Re:Why would they subject themselves to this?

[Martin Blank]

Why would they accept an OS that gets slower with every release?

RH9 pretty much screamed on one of my home systems. FC1 was pretty snappy, too. FC3, not so much. FC5 was even a little slower. FC6 seemed to stabilize. In all cases, I was running a pretty basic desktop environment without anything flashy, not much in the way of extraneous services running (HTTP and FTP only), and only me accessing them.

All major OSes get some bloat as they grow. Vista's sheer size is inexcusable, but it's not terribly slower than XP, at least on a 1.6GHz P4 notebook.

Re:Paid customers getting the shaft?

[Ucklak]

I am dating my self but I remember seeing that skit when it was first aired.
Mod parent Funny.

Re:Unacceptable

[vijayiyer]

OS X requires no keys, not even a serial number.

Re:Why would they subject themselves to this?

[dgatwood]

I run Tiger on a 900 MHz G3 iBook all the time. It's very usable. And my experience concurs with the GP's experience: it does seem significantly faster than Panther. However Tiger does require more RAM than Panther. If you don't have enough RAM, your computer will be paging to your hard drive pretty heavily, which could make Tiger appear slower than Panther. Add more RAM if you think Tiger is slower than Panther. Chances are, you just don't have enough.

That said, until you've booted Mac OS X public beta in 32 Megs of RAM, though, you don't know the definition of slow, and thus have no room to complain.... :-)

Re:Alternative

[Mr2001]

And all for a lower price for what you get... Lower price? Not really. There's at least one Apple model that's cheaper than the equivalent Windows box (the Mac Mini), and one of the desktops might qualify... but it's nowhere near true across the board. If you're getting a laptop, Apple will bend you over a stump.

Re:Why would they subject themselves to this?

[Des Herriott]

No. X11 is not a GUI, any more than the GDI or DirectX are GUIs for Windows.

X11 is the device-independent driver upon which GUIs (KDE, GNOME, GnuSTEP, XFCE...) are built.

Re:Why would they subject themselves to this?

[jlarocco]

Heck, *I* have zero interest in doing that sort of thing these days, and it wasn't that long ago I did the whole Linux-from-scratch thing, just for the hell of it. I'm more than happy to sacrifice some (dirt cheap) disk space and processor time, to save myself the effort of putting the whole thing together myself and subsequently having to keep it maintained. This is precisely the same reason I don't use Linux on my desktop - because it's more work to get everything going and keep it that way.

No shit? Linux From Scratch is hard to maintain? I'm shocked! Shocked! Did you really just say that Linux From Scatch was hard to maintain, so you stopped using Linux? Linux From Scratch is meant to teach the deep inner workings of Linux, it's not supposed to be easy to maintain. There are dozens of Linux distros meant to be "easy to use", but you went ahead and picked the one that's purposely difficult? I don't think Linux From Scratch is your problem here.

Debian's testing branch is more stable than your LFS, it's current within a week of new software releases, and you can get daily automatic updates with a click of a button. I'm sure you'll point out some reason the average user is too stupid to do that, but it's a hell of a lot easier than LFS.

Close. More important than the "set of GUI tools" is a standard, stable, "set of libraries" (I use the term "libraries", but I basically mean a stable, defined set of basic functionalities that will _always_ be present in a known form). This is a _huge_ feature than OS X (and Windows) has over Linux.

Why should I, as a user, have to worry about libraries? I shouldn't. And with a distro like Debian or SuSe, I don't. I open Synaptic, click on the application I want, click "Apply", and the application is installed along with any necessary libraries. Oh, and it'll automatically get updated along with the rest of the system. Try doing that on Mac or Windows.

As a developer, I still don't see your point. It makes very little difference to me if I'm using the API built into the OS, or a third party library. In one case I'll have to add a line to the build scripts. Big fuckin' deal.

Re:Why would they subject themselves to this?

[DrSkwid]

Building a kernel with just the drivers you want to use was one of the first post-installation jobs of FreeBSD.

You can't even boot Linux from a floppy no more :(

The main OSes are big balls of cruft bloated horribly by the 80/20 rule for general purpose computing but only the OSS ones allow you to do something about it.

Even then you still face the possible time penalty of recompiling userland. That's why I'm glad plan9 only takes 15 mins to make world.

Re:Upgrade does not include Vista Premium..

[TheRaven64]

Not entirely true. At the Farnborough Airshow (back when that's what it was called), someone was demonstrating an 'idiot proof' fly-by-wire aircraft. The test pilot decided to test that it was idiot proof by raising the undercarriage while on the ground. The system allowed this, and did something very expensive, because the designers of the 'idiot proof' system had underestimated the upper bounds on idiocy. I always think of this when someone quote the line 'when you build an idiot-proof system, nature builds a better idiot.'

Re:Why would they subject themselves to this?

[Chatterton]

You can't even boot Linux from a floppy no more :(

Hum, I can boot linux on a single floppy and make it my firewall with all the needed utilities. For exemple with Coyote Linux...

Re:family values

[mollymoo]

You can't buy an HP or anything else I've found with the same spec for under $1500 either - I did find a slower, much heavier HP with a lower resolution screen and poorer battery life for $1560 or so. You can buy a Sony which is close, but has a lower resolution screen and weighs a pound more, for $1850 though. Gah, I ran the number here a couple of weeks back, but it's fallen off the bottom of my message list, it would be handy if subscriber could retreive it. You can certainly buy a laptop for much less, but I've not found one at all with all the same features and the closest models available (like the Sony, which is still inferior in significant ways) cost similar money. If you do go and look make sure you match everything: processor, RAM, screen, HD, optical drive, weight, battery life, included restore disks, all OS features (cf XP Pro, Vista Ultimate)... it's easy to find something cheaper with the same CPU and RAM which is noticeably inferior in other ways, but try and find something which is actually equivalent and see what it costs in Windows-land.

Re:Paid customers getting the shaft?

[Iamthefallen]

It was a different time. Somehow I doubt that scene would do very well today.

A resolution straight from a dude at Microsoft...

[prophetmike]

I'm one of the people suffering from this issue and have been looking for a solution. Seems I found one when I was browsing the Vista newsgroups in Windows Mail... According to Doug Hite at Microsoft, he said the following......

Hi Everyone. I finally got an answer. From what I have been told:

The Vista Family Discount (VFD) team has found the problem with the product keys. Turns out they are not Vista Keys. The VFD team is working on a fix and will email out new keys to everyone with in 4-5 days.

If your key does not work; odds are its one of the bad ones. If you do not hear back from the VFD team with a new key next week; I would send them an email or call:

email: vistafamilydiscount[AT]one.microsoft.upgrade.com
Phone: 1-800-835-0663

I hope this helps! Thanks and sorry for any issues... -Doug I hope they stick to this :P