Consumer Vista Upgrades Moving at Snail's Pace

Chester Freeze writes "During the holiday season, many shoppers bought PCs with the promise of quick, free Vista upgrades. The reality has been something else entirely: many Dell and HP customers are being told that they won't receive their copies of Vista before April. 'One source at a major OEM who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the real issue is that OEMs are still not sure which PCs are really ready to support Vista, and which PCs aren't... Customers who qualify for an Express Upgrade also qualify for OEM support for Windows Vista, even if their machines came with Windows XP. The last thing a Dell, Gateway, or HP wants to do is start sending out upgrades to customers who might have video cards that do not have particularly stable drivers yet (or sound cards, or RAID controllers, etc.). This could be a support disaster.'"

Comments

Re:really?

[baggins2001]

No kiddiing, especially with Dell, we needed computers with XP because our Apps are supported on XP and our users are trained on Office 2003. We expressly told them we wanted XP and not Vista and not Office 2007.
The quote even specified it.
The computers show up and they have Vista and Office 2007. We have to spend > 3 hours getting it arranged for them to come pick up the computers.

Re:I can't possibly understand why...

[zappepcs]

I know why people will give it up... DRM, or more specifically the hoops you have to jump through to install Vista. Many people are trying to not pay the license fee now, and Vista will only push them farther toward trying Linux. Hey, the price is right, and it does all that they want to do anyway, so now is the time to drop MS products.

Sure, businesses will still find the money and time to upgrade, but most of them will do a forklift upgrade with a business maintenance plan on the desktop machines. This is a luxury that home pc owners do not have. The only real choice is to switch or suffer the pains of upgrades, license fees, support issues, software headaches, and the continued use of an OS that is the malware hackers preferred target.

This isn't trolling or Linux fanboi-ism, just an observation of what I'm seeing in the general populace.

Here is my issue.

[Buzz_Litebeer]

I submitted for an upgrade waited weeks and weeks, and then sent an e-mail to the support email asking why I had not received it, and if I had somehow mad an error in the documentation and such that I had sent.

I got a reply that said "Thank you for submitting to customer service, your upgrade order has been cancelled per your request so that you can re-submit with the correct information."

So instead of verifying my order, they canceled it, and the page to do submissions are gone, and besides that the documentation said "no copies of this documentation will be accepted," but I had already submitted the documentation via physical snail mail. So I have essentially been SCREWED out of 200 bucks worth of software.

To put it mildly, I will never purchase Windows Vista, and I am sure the Pirate bay can help me get the software I was promised. I have never before had a request for information turn into such a fraudulent cancellation before, and since I already paid for it, I am not feeling under any obligation to purchase it again.