How Much Does a Vista Upgrade Cost?

dptalia writes "Microsoft has rolled out its Vista upgrade program, where people can buy a qualifying PC with XP today and upgrade to Vista later for free. This article talks about what free really means. Some companies, such as Dell, charge $45 for converting to Vista Home from XP home. And then comes the question of actually trying to upgrade your computer... Is "free" really worth it?"

Cue standard slashdot responses:

[dada21]

1. Does it run Linux?
2. It'll cost me nothing because you can't upgrade *nix to Win*
3. Profit!
4. I already read this on digg.
5. ...as in beer.

Well..

[Arthur B.]

My dell came with windows XP and a free upgrade to linux !

Re:Cue standard slashdot responses:

[aussie_a]

What happened to the great American "can do" attitude

Don't worry. I have a very can do attitude when it comes to Vista. As in, I can do without Vista.

Need a new term

[dbIII]

"Free" as in Vista.

The pleasures of NOT upgrading

[codefrog]

It's a total toss up for me on which I'll have more fun not buying; Vista or a PS3.
On the one hand, not buying Vista is a Genuine Advantage in many ways...
but by not buying a PS3, I save more money and also get the bonus of not upgrading to newer DRM.

Thank goodness I can afford to do both!

Cue standard slashdot responses:

[aussie_a]

1. Making lists of what the standard slashdot responses are.

In other words...

[joe_cot]

Dear OEM distributors:

We screwed up. Please don't go selling Linux PCs this Christmas.

Regards,

Bill

Re:a recent "install" experience

[dknj]

I recently built my own machine... 2G memory, .5TB (2 SATA drives), 3.06Ghz dual core... all very cool. I spent almost 2 weeks getting Ubuntu installed and working properly (for what reason would an OS not come with generic video drivers?). The sound was a nightmare to get running, don't get me started on my unsupported video capture card. Fortunately (I guess), a lot of the drivers came with the linux kernel (as one might expect), but the installation and configuration was amazingly tedious, and error prone.

I'm convinced one part of the horrible nature is that even today it seems that EVERY driver, EVERY re-configuration demanded intimate knowledge of my hardware though in my wildest imagination, I couldn't think of a rationale -- this continuity interruptus makes for a tedious, drawn out, error-sprinkled, bad-taste-in-the-mouth experience.

I finally shook out all of the bugs (oh, yeah, about 100MB+ of software updates -- the original was from earlier this year, go figure), got a SCREAMING machine, absolutely delighted with the configuration and performance (although my 3d benchmark isn't as high as windows).

Now, to be on-topic, I can't begin to imagine these upgrades will be problem free, I can't even think they'd be problem-sparse. It's non-trivial work installing from scratch, much less considering layering something as big as GLXserver over an existing Xorg installation. I wouldn't want to do it. I've read enough reviews from people with bollixed machines (granted, they were working with CVS releases) -- there will be a LOT of people out there who've committed too much data and personal work (blood, sweat and tears) on their new Linux machines -- and they're going to lose data (ReiserFS anyone?).

It's interesting to note the article doesn't recommends upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu by doing a clean install. That's not really upgrading Ubuntu, that's installing Ubuntu. How many people will not have had their data backed up properly ahead of this? How many will be left with applications that ran on a previous kernel that won't run on the current kernel?

The article is probably wrong, this is GNU's olive branch to... well... no one really... who had hoped to roll out the new machines with brand spanking new Linux distro already installed. It's a PR debacle and nightmare in the making. Fortunately for Linux, that would be mostly irrelevant.

(To contrast, on same machine described above, I took the new Vista release candidate, booted up, installed and got completely running, all sound and video working perfectly -- in less than 2 hours!

Funny, for my life I could not find a satisfactory solution (or even find a google solution) to get Grub configured properly to reference Vista... Finally gave up, and let the new Vista boot loader handle it, the configuration was painless and flawless. Go figure.)

Feel free to replace with with Mac OS X, FreeBSD, BeOS, any other Linux distro, etc. Just because you fail at life (i mean really, who has issues with a windows installation on stable hardware....) doesn't mean you need to act like a hobbyist OS is the holy grail. Oh yea, Syllable [syllable.org] 4 Life!!!</sarcasm>

You forgot the ponies

[leamanc]

What about OMG Ponies!!!!?

Re:Cue standard slashdot responses:

[bangenge]

You forgot the chairs and the exploding laptops. ;)

One glaring one you missed:

[The Wooden Badger]

6. Imagine a Beowulf clus- Oh, crap. Nevermind.

FUD

[daniel_howell]

If it's free you don't want it. It'll be buggy, it'll lack focus, customer support will be lacking and you'll end up having to pay far more to get someone to sort it out than if you had paid for software in the first place. Free software is a false economy. Free software is UnAmerican. Free software destroys decent hardworking mom-and-pop all-american companies. Free software causes acne. Don't buy free software, pay through the nose for our good old, secure, reliable microsoft products. Errr, hang on...