Monday, June 29, 2009

Microsoft rips us off yet again

I love Windows 7 (aka Vista Light, Vista Right, Vista SP2 etc). Whatever you call it, I've been running it on one PC for over a year (3 versions) and on another since the release of RC1. Even ran it in a VM under XP. Whatever the test scores, it ran beautifully on my test machine, an old P4, 3.2GHz with just 1GB of RAM. Fast starts, few crashes even with the beta, great hardware recognition and drivers for almost anything. Since I've been a good laddie & sent any bug info, crash data etc off to Microsoft, I foolishly thought there might be a bit of a discount at the end of it - no promises from MS I know, but it seemed like a good idea for them. Might have soothed some of the very unhappy Vista customers who, after all, are basically paying for a giant bug-fix/service pack.

So in the US you can pre-order Home Premium for $49.99 or Professional for $99.99. For a couple of weeks. In Australia you can damn well wait till Oct 22nd and pay $199 and $399 for the equivalent upgrades. Four (4) times as much. And I'm going to pay $400 - $800 to upgrade? I think not Mr Ballmer. Back to XP & Ubuntu until I upgrade the hardware.

Oh and Europe & Japan also get discounts (less than the US of course) but Oz gets zip. Again.

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