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.

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.