RSSWindows 7 OEM price even cheaper if you get Vista Upgrade first
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published September 29, 2009, 11:47 AM
Windows 7 SKU
Full retail MSRP 3
OEM full install MSRP
Comparable Vista SKU
Full retail MSRP
OEM full install MSRP
Home Premium
$199.99
$99.99 1
Home Premium
$224.99
$89.99 2
Professional
$299.99
$134.99 1
Business
$278.99
$149.99 2
Ultimate
$319.99
$174.99 1
Ultimate
$289.99
$179.99 (32-bit) / $189.99 (64-bit) 2
1 Limited offer, expected to end October 20.
2 Comes with free Tech Guarantee Windows 7 upgrade coupon.
3 MSRP from Microsoft for sale October 22, pre-order prices may be lower.
As quoted by Newegg.com, September 29, 2009, 11:30 am EDT
A little over three weeks until global availability (GA) day for Windows 7, major software retailers have heavily discounted pre-orders for the OEM full-installation editions (minimal packaging), with Newegg offering the Home Premium SKU at $99.99. That's half the price of the MSRP for the full retail edition, and four cents more than a retail upgrade package.
But that's still not the least expensive option. For an indeterminate period of time, Newegg has slashed $20 off the OEM price of the Vista Home Premium SKU, marking it down to $89.99 and leaving the free Windows 7 Tech Guarantee upgrade coupon attached. It's a little less convenient, you're stuck with a copy of Vista you may never use, and your Windows 7 version is an upgrade rather than a full install, but you save ten bucks. In fact, the version without the Tech Guarantee coupon is $10 more; you would actually spend more money not to get the Win7 upgrade coupon.
Newegg today is also offering deals on the Professional and Ultimate SKUs, though for them, it's cheaper to go with the Windows 7 full-install OEM than with the comparable Vista version with upgrade coupon. A single license for the Win7 Professional SKU saves as much as $15 over the comparable Vista version, and Win7 Ultimate OEM will save you $5 over the comparable 32-bit edition, $15 over the 64-bit.
Curiously, the deals for single-license packages are better than for multiples today, as a three-pack Win7 Ultimate OEM runs $549.99, a three-pack Win7 Professional runs $409.99, and a three-pack Win7 Home Premium is priced at $349.99.
As we've mentioned here in Betanews before, a migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 is not altogether impossible, though it requires migrating through Vista first. There are definitely headaches involved, and many professionals suggest that those headaches can be avoided by either cleanly installing Windows 7 with a full install version, or create multiple boot partitions and place a clean Win7 in a new one alongside the older XP partition. As of now, the price for avoiding these headaches and reclaiming several lost hours -- at least for Home Premium installers -- is merely ten bucks.
A very nice read (if you wanted to fall asleep right quick).
*lethargic yawn*
Score: -2
|Oh, and I just think about the $29 Mac OS 10.6 upgrade (snow leopard)...
Microsoft have to build a table even to understand how to sum prices in order to calculate the upgrade price. Then you have to carefully think about how-to upgrade(full article), and then and advertise about it... Need to say more? Shameful...
Score: -5
|Yeah, it was rough. $50 for the upgrade, 10 seconds thinking about doing a full vs. upgrade install, and then a 25 minute install.
Whew...thank God I don't have to do that often.
Oh, wait...you weren't implying that the scenario you describe applies to everyone? or even anything but a small minority?
Need I say more?
Score: 1
|Yeah, totally agree. One version of OSX, not multiple, arbitrarily stripped down versions. Glad to see Apple selling OSX for so cheap which is pushing down the price of the super expensive Microsoft OSes down a bit, although they are still way overpriced for what you get.
Score: -2
|From your previous article going from XP-->vista-->W7: "Probably because we used such an old VHD to begin with, with a small initial size (20 GB), the upgrade-to-upgrade process did manage to consume the entire day."
I don't know of anyone that works with computers where this time investment is worth the $10-$90 you'd save going the upgrade path. Not only that, but XP-->Vista upgrades were nightmarish in our tests. We have to use the cleanspool utility from the 2003 resource kit to remove all HP drivers, as well as the .net cleanup tool for incompatibilities between .net on XP and .net on Vista.
Not to mention people simply shouldn't be using 32-bit anymore. The minimum amount of memory these days on even the cheapest of PC's is 4 GiB.
All in all, pay the MS tax. Go retail if you think you will stick with 7 beyond 3 years. Go OEM if you think MS will have a new OS out before then or you frequently change out hardware.
Score: 0
|I'm looking forward to gettng my grubby little hands on this :D
Score: -2
|Hey SF3 - sorry this is unrelated. I don't see another way to contact you but you read your comments... :)
Since you love benchmarking so much. Would you care to check out and compare Microsoft Security Essentials, which seems to have gotten out of beta and fully released recently? Cheers.
Score: -2
|Yeah, that would be interesting :)
Score: -1
|Seconded. Resource Usage/overhead, speed, and reliability reviews would be excellent.
Score: 0
|Damn this inability to edit comments, but...
What build are you using? Mine updated today, but I am not sure if I need to download the "non-beta", or if it just updated to that. :p
Score: 0
|Thirded
Score: 0
|@PC. In About it says: 1.0.1500.0 and nothing about beta. But I thought it said so for some time now...
Score: 0
|According to Ars it is 1.0.1611. I downloaded it from MS again and it did update my client from 1500 to 1611...even though I had just performed an update.
My conclusion is that the beta does not automatically update itself (yet?) to the release version.
Score: 0
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