davidmcg wrote:Is the pre-order price cheaper than the price it is going to be after release? Think I heard something like that before but I'm not too sure. Any ideas?
The pre-order price is the full version. If you got it quick enough it was going for £45, Home Premium E, a bargain considering Microsoft want £170 for it. Realistically an OEM copy is roughly about the same price if not a little bit more. XP Home OEM is currently, if you shop around a bit, about £65. Windows 7 will probably be around that sort of area give or take.
Anyway if you buy bucketloads of OEM Windows 7 licences, it'll be cheaper anyway to the big manufacturers who will get through them like there's no tomorrow, as opposed to Joe Bloggs who'll realistically only need one or two, not thousands.
cdd wrote:I've always found the Home editions of windows are a snare and a delusion, they miss out things that geeky people like Metropol users would like such as Group Policy editor (nice for tweaking little things - like graying out buttons in Windows programs etc) and also things like Vista's Previous Versions.
You could copy the Group Policy Editor file from an XP Pro installation and it will work happily on an XP Home system. Most if not all tweaks available in GPE are available online by editing the registry manually.
Previous Versions was a nice idea but I'm glad it only turned up in the higher-end editions of Vista and not Home Basic/Premium where I'm sure it would generate copious support calls from thick people who select it accidentally.
Neil Jones wrote:I dare say if previous activation processes are followed (since realistically there's nothing MS can do about it), there'd be nothing to stop you using one licence on dozens of computers if you just activate each one by phone.
Wasn't Windows genuine advantage meant to start moaning on the deactivated machine after a few weeks of you having done that? personally I prefer the slmgr -rearm ploy, I re-install windows about once a month anyway so 90 days is fine for me
Genuine Advantage limits key "enhancements" to those people with genuine licences and product keys and only flags up a handful anyway. Such "enhancements" include Windows Defender, Media Player 11 and the majority of downloads, add-ons and occasionally useless crap that Microsoft think you might want.
Genuine Advantage will not flag up the fact that you're using one key on multiple computers, it has no way of knowing that. "slmgr -rearm" is not applicable to XP. Once activated, usually a Windows PC stays activated unless you screw it up, wipe it, occasionally after you repair it or change enough hardware to force an activation. While you theoretically can deactivate a machine, there's no real reason to.
). One thing I really miss coming from a Mac back to XP is the lack of decent window manipulation and 7 has good stuff in droves. Also XP's wifi has always been dreadful and 7's is vastly superior, as is the way that sharing stuff across networks is less of a black art in Windows 7. On top of that, I find the search in windows 7 to bog down the cpu a LOT less than in xp. 
