02 February 2007

A room with a Vista

I've been toying with the idea of buying Vista for a some time now. I have a beta version installed in a spare partition but some hard disk corruption issues prevented me from giving it a good run for its money. So, having not looked at it for a while, I've been reading CNET's Seven days of Vista series over the past week to see what's what in the final release.

Being a technology obsessed geek, the Ultimate Edition was the only viable option but it came as a roundhouse kick to the face when i learnt this would retail at £350! "Guess I'll be sticking to XP for now then", I though mournfully.

Not so, for at the end of day 7's post was the pièce de résistance:

Our final tip would be to consider buying OEM versions of Vista ... the consumer version of Ultimate is [£349], yet it's just £121.68 for the OEM version

I was aware you could buy OEM software but had always thought the difference in price was similar to that of retail and OEM hardware. "Surely that can't be right", I though, but sure enough dabs.com has both versions retail boxed and OEM.

The only differences with the OEM being you don't get any support and it's tied to the motherboard it's first installed on. I don't need support and, in the unlikely event that my mobo dies and i have to buy another OEM copy, I'll still be £50 richer. Besides you can get three OEMs for the price of one retail so I could just get a few spares!

1 comment:

Michael James said...

What I feel is worse is if you look at the actual cost in the U.S there various flavours of Vista are considerably cheaper than ours.

The blame for this is usually placed on the cost of localisation, but considering the U.S language is a derivative of our fine Queen's English, why are we paying the extortionate cost!

Its also taking a look at the new Office 2007, my thoughts on this is located at my blog