Sunbeltblog comments
In my opinion what's missing is Media Center Edition although Ultimate includes all feauters of it. I usually have different OS installed on my home computers because of different purposes. I do use one of PC as my entertainment center where Media Center fits just perfect. I use my old notebook for reading where XP Home or Vista Home Basic is a good solution and I have my development box where I run Ultimate now (used to be XP pro). What would be more convenient to me is to have a some sort of Vista Media Center without some other features included in Ultimate. In general, I would consider Anytime Upgrade to be a pretty much appropriate idea. Please don't forget that in Vista all installation media will be physically split to reduce software piracy meaning that users won't be able to hack the installation package and turn Home Basic into Ultimate since the contents of CDs or DVDs for each Vista SKU are different.
P.S. Home Basic runs pretty good even on my old 1.8 GGz notebook with 512MB of shared memory along with Office 12 and Visual Studio 2005 express editions. Home Premium was a complete overkill for my notebook so I decided to go with Basic.
"Microsoft is making it easy for you to upgrade one version of Vista to another."
Not so much, no....
Making it "easy to upgrade" would involve making it easy to upgrade. This is not what they have done. XP Pro users are forced to either pay for the more expensive versions or to first wipe out their copy of XP. I think I'll just pass altogether.
Microsoft can't win either way. People complaint that too many versions is confusing and that they should have two packages: one for home and one for business.
Yet, there are a lot of people that say they don't want to pay top dollar for features they are not going to use. In this case, multiple verions will allow you to pay for the feature set that you are most likely to use and not have to worry about paying for features you won't use. But now you are back to the first issue: too many versions.
My personal opinion is that Microsoft should only make 1 version of Windows and you pay for it and that's it. If you are not going to use a feature, too bad. Hard drive space and UPC cycles are cheap these days. My Mac doesn't have any of this home, pro, enterprise crap to worry about and neither should Windows. I have yet to hear anyone complaint about paying for too many features from the Mac camp. Windows users are just a whiny lot that don't really know what they want.
What are Mac vs PC hardware costs (not counting latest Macs on Intel chip)?
I'm just curious since never had Mac.
Commenting by HaloScan
