wininsider.com — "Microsoft plans to market several versions of Vista but will distribute all of the OS bits with every product shipped so users can easily unlock and step up to more full-featured versions using electronic keys, sources said."
Jan 7, 2006 View in Crawl 4
gregdJan 7, 2006Submitter
I, for one, think it's a bad idea. Not sure what Microsoft is thinking in this instance. It probably will be hacked inside of a week...
truepatriotJan 8, 2006
yay no need to dl xp pro just type in a pasword thanks MS!
ntropJan 8, 2006
Uhmmm... This means that EVERY version of Vista will have EVERY vulnerability and have to be patched for? I hope that the parts that are "disabled" are truly disabled and not just hidden. This would be a worm-writers dream otherwise.It might make it easier for MS to patch though...
coolsilverJan 9, 2006
Hopefully this helps in repairing and activating the os after a spyware nuke goes off on a users pc.I have to fix it all at a local shop and call microsoft at least once a week for a damned activation code.
dongiaconiaJan 9, 2006
I think part of the point of this is that Microsoft WANTS the tech savvy to have experience with windows OSes so that we can recommend it other people. One of the TWIT Pod casts talked about how Photoshop is one of the highest exploited programs in terms of copies, but by allowing that, it grows the customer base and makes more people use the software, which means more people will have experience with it, and therefore be able to recommend it. They actually used the following as an example to show this:When I was in college, Microsoft came to the campus and gave a presentation. They asked for a show of hands of how many people have windows on their computer. And then they said, "Keep your hands up if it is a copy you paid for.... It's okay, you can be honest, we know most of you didn't."By putting all the OSes in one simple thing, it makes it so that the tech savvy people will have a level of familiarity with what each version of the OS gives, and therefore will know what to recommend to the less savvy relatives and friends. They are doing this to promote more people using their OS. They know people will always exploit it, what they try to do is make sure the mass of people that are less tech oriented will have to buy it; this helps keep their customer base up. ESPECIALLY since they have seen how little enthusiasm the tech elites have for Vista.At least that's my 2 cents...
fumanchuJan 9, 2006
1] The article says that "No matter which edition you buy you get all the bits and a key to unlock it. Everyone will have all the bits,"This does NOT mean it will all be "installed but disabled." If it's just sitting in cab files [or the equivalent] it won't take up more than a couple GBs of HDD space --and maybe not half of that. Not exactly "a pile of bloated s**t on you HD." And if you buy it on a DVD or set of CD's, it probably wouldn't put ANYTHING on your HDD but what you paid for.2] If priced properly, this WILL encourage upgrades from XP and also from one version of Vista to another.3] This WILL PROBABLY be as crackable as XP. But since I never personally cracked XP, I'm not going to shoot my mouth off asserting that which I known not.4] I doubt it will entice me, since I'm slowly converting all Fu Manchu Central HQ computers to Linux flavours, except for one dual-boot [Ubuntu-Win2000] machine, mostly for gaming. I'm not a M$ fan by any means after using their OSs for 20 years. But I'm not foaming at the mouth to make dumb comments just for the sake of dissing them.
f1r3Mar 1, 2006
I'm sure there is something nasty behind this that is going to make this a lot harder to crack than it looks... I'm tired of the cripple-ware already.. the multiple versions..its just an excuse to bloat the price of the features...