For students and faculty, Vista is cheap.

[amin]

I just bought the Vista Home Premium upgrade to install my Mac Pro via Boot Camp. It was $69 shipped (academicsuperstore.com). I have a legit old copy of Windows to upgrade from, but you don't even need one. It turns out that if you install the Vista upgrade alone without activating, and then reinstall the upgrade over it and then activate, it works (thinks it's upgrading). How silly is that? I'm not encouraging that somewhat shady practice, and I think most people have an old but legit copy of Windows hanging around somewhere.

I think $69 for an OS that only comes around once every 5 years or so is a damn good price, and the Home Premium version doesn't seem too stripped. As for the non-academic prices, they are too high IMO. At least there's always the option of going with an OEM version from Newegg, etc.

 

[amin]

Please note, I said cheap, not good . Check out the user reviews from the people who bought the Home Premium upgrade: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Vista-Premium-UPGRADE/dp/B000HCZ9BG

This was such an incredible pain to install, and then impossible to run. My printer didn't work anymore, my favorite software didn't work anymore, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what benefit I might derive from this if I was even able to fix these problems, so I went back to XP. My next computer will not run Windows of any description - I'm done with Microsoft.

 

[rogersmj]

Cheap...or free! I get it for free, being part of the Computer Science department at Purdue. We have an MSDN Academic Alliance agreement with Microsoft, and we get access to this site where we basically download any Microsoft software -- Vista, XP, Exchange Server, Office, Visual Studio, and a whole bunch of other stuff you've probably never heard of that normally costs thousands -- absolutely free.

The only trouble is, I haven't downloaded Vista from that site yet because I don't know what I'd do with it. I have it on my computer at work, and I don't like it. I'm perfectly content using XP on my Macs through Parallels for the Windows apps I need.

 

[Osarkon]

That 'shady' practise is fine, microsoft made an announcement about it saying that at the moment they're going to leave the hole because they don't expect a significant amount of people to take advantage of it.

So they're aware of it, they just don't care (at the moment).

And yes, MSDNAA is brilliant, I get Vista Business and XP Pro for free through university.

 

[mattscott306]

That 'shady' practise is fine, microsoft made an announcement about it saying that at the moment they're going to leave the hole because they don't expect a significant amount of people to take advantage of it.

So they're aware of it, they just don't care (at the moment).

Can you provide a link?

 

[Osarkon]

Can you provide a link?

http://itsvista.com/2007/02/microsoft-says-it-wont-stop-vista-upgrade-thieves/
There you go, took me a while to dig that back up.