1) E4300 Price Cut: The Inquirer says the following:
“On the desktop front, the E6420, the E6320 and the E4400 are now expected to arrive on the 22nd of April.”
Since it isn’t going to make much sense to charge less for the 2GHz E4400 (which will debut at $133) than for the 1.8GHz E4300, it’s probably pretty safe to save that the planned price cut on the E4300 from $163 to $113 will happen April 22, too.
2) No More Clean Installs Using Upgrade Discs With Windows Vista: This is one of those little events that will have more real impact on people than a hundred PR events. Here’s the MS statement. Please note the recent date, after most people had bought the “buy XP now, get Vista later” deals.
If you haven’t figured out what it means, it means that if you buy a Vista upgrade disk to save some money, every time you decide to reinstall the OS, you’re going to have to install XP, activate it, THEN install Vista immediately thereafter.
This is ridiculous, and let me tell you, any person who can figure out a crack to this is going to become VERY popular.
MS is going to make people waste time doing a double install (and given that upgrade installs generally have more problems than clean installs, if this doesn’t make you cringe, it should) just to be able to do a double activation.
I fail to see why MS couldn’t just change their activation policy so that you’d need to provide both the XP full and Vista upgrade serial numbers to activate in this situation. That would do the same thing with minimal programming effort on MS’s part, but save users literally millions of hours performing installations just to immediately wipe them out.
The idea, of course, is to force you to buy a full copy of Vista, which is bad enough, but even if you know better, you know your Sixpack friends won’t, and when they trash their systems, guess who’ll they’ll be looking for.
So even if you know better, you still (probably) won’t be able to duck it.
Not good. Not good at all.
Be the first to comment