[QUOTE]You bought an Windows XP-based PC–before the Vista launch–and heard rosy promises of an OS upgrade. But scoring Vista has been a painful process for many…
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130451-c,consumeradvice/article.html
This computer came with a free* upgrade to Vista.
I never bothered to apply for the upgrade because-
a) free* actually means a £10 charge
b) the DRM management stuff built into Vista
c) reports of drivers not being ready for older hardware
d) even the 1G of memory on this machine does not come up to the ideal of 2G
e) other assorted bug reports
Sticking with XP here until the next time I buy a new computer.
This happens with tons of people… like me…
Thinking a little we feel that MS was advanced in time: a lot of machines aren’t prepared for Vista and users are not prepared to change the machine just because MS requires to…
No way I will have Vista on this system for much the same reasons (b to e) as Frank.
Even when I come to upgrade this system or replace it, I don’t know if I will have Vista even then. By the time that happens (system upgrade) more news of the Vista replacement, supposedly earmarked for 2009 may be out. Depending on that Vista may well get skipped, like winME and win2k got skipped by me, win98se to XP Pro and the Pro version still has considerable service life left.
Vista might be more mature and we will have seen where the DRM dice fall (latest non-DRM release of some iTunes downloads) if less of the record/film/media industry exclude DRM then the Vista DRM functionality is a busted flush.
Got my Vista upgrade disk through HP and didn’t cost me a cent, Not even for shipping. The upgrade went smooth, because HP sent a second disk with Vista drivers made for my machine.