Hidden cost of new, cheap laptops
August 10, 2009 by Valerie HelmbreckPosted in: Budgets and spending, Hardware, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Software, Software shortcuts, operating systems
A special offered recently by Wal-Mart and Best Buy stores drew lots of attention and customers. But owners of these computers will get a nasty surprise when they try to upgrade from the Vista version installed on most of them.
Most of these laptops came loaded with Windows Vista Home Basic operating system, which doesn’t include a free upgrade to Windows 7 in the U.S.
The folks who shelled out about $300 for these machines will have to come up with an additional $120 to get Windows 7 and get rid of the much-maligned Vista.
Microsoft has also published its “upgrade” paths — the rules of the road for installing Windows 7. The software company won’t support upgrade from:
- Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows XP, Windows Vista® RTM, Windows Vista Starter, Windows 7 M3, Windows 7 Beta, Windows 7 RC, or Windows 7 IDS
- Windows NT® Server 4.0, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server® 2003, Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server 2008 R2
To download the full, four-page “Windows 7 Upgrade Path” document, visit here.
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Tags: cheap, laptops, Microsoft, path, upgrade, Vista, Windows 7
August 11th, 2009 at 9:10 am
This is precisely why I sold my one and a half year old HP with Windows Vista and became the proud owner of a new iMac.
The HP motherboard crashed, and after numerours prior issues with Vista not playing well with my other apps, I dumped it and went Mac.
Can’t tell you how many times I had to pay the Geek Squad to make the Vista “work”.
Sick of paying for Microsoft snafu’s.
No regrets!
August 18th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
My next laptop will be an Apple machine.
I know computers, I’ve been in the business for 36 years. A computer should not require the amount of continual maintenance and fiddling that all MS OS’s require.
My mother, who is 87 and has had her own machines since the early 8)’s (an Osbourne,) has actually spent more time troubleshooting her Windows machine over the past two years than she has using it for those things she bought it for.
I had an old beef with Apple because of their closed hardware architecture (yes, it was a long time past,) but I no longer recommend Windows for anyone. If you can scrape up the money (and used Mac’s are fairly reasonably priced,) that’s my favored choice. If you’re broke, use Linux.
But then I think that most people should be able to use a machine without knowing anything about the OS, since the useful part of a computer are the applications. A good OS is like a good translator, it’s between you and your work, but it should be unnoticeable, invisible.
You cannot be invisible if you need daily attention.