One of the big frustrations for Windows users has been the steep pricing Microsoft has attached to upgrades of its software. Apple users like to brag that upgrades to the Mac OS are only $29.99 and can be downloaded (The latest update, Mountain Lion will only cost $19.99). That is true of course, but Apple is a hardware company, not a software company.
Still, having to shell out at least $100 (The Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade cost $119 and the Windows 7 Pro went for $199) every time a new Windows OS was released didn’t sit well with users, particularly if the OS was a disaster like Windows Millenium or Vista.
But take heart Windows users!
The upgrade to Windows 8 will cost a mere $39.99 when it releases (which is supposed to be this month) and you’ll be able to download it. A packaged DVD can still be had, but will cost $69.99 to obtain.
So, Windows users in the community, are you be upgrading?
Our home computer that my wife uses is on Windows XP. I’ll be upgrading it to Windows 8 just to prolong my investment. It still runs great.
Cool. I still have a portable notebook with Windows XP on it and it runs great.
Unsure yet
It’s about time that the upgrade costs were brought back to a more reasonable level to buy outright. For that price, I’d probably buy it for our home PC. The speed improvements are impressive and the fact that it runs well on older machines is great as well make this a pretty decent upgrade. The Metro interface is a little different, but not horrible, for a desktop.
Thats good to hear about how it performs on older machines. Do you think it’s faster than W7?
I think that in startup and shutdown times, it’s definitely faster, but that’s partly because MS is doing some stuff behind the scenes. I know that to get my older laptop running on Win8 takes ~ 20-30 seconds. That beats my quad core running Win7 easily. For normal day to day work, it needs some ramp-up time, but for most uses, it seems to work just fine. I showed it to some younger kids and they took about 10 seconds to adjust to the screen, said it was cool, and set to downloading games.
My laptop is a Lenovo x220T convertible tablet. Windows 7 works well enough on it, but touch functionality leaves something to be desired. I played with both win8 previews, and assuming they’ve smoothed out the bugs and Lenovo/Wacom’s drivers are in order I will be picking the update up ASAP.
I am undecided. Some more research on what is available new on 8. I am using VISTA on my desktop and I am pretty happy with it. If there is a feature on 8 that I use a lot and has improvements I probably will upgrade. But I will not get it just for mainly cosmetic reasons.
At $39.99, why not?!
My kids use my former PC with Windows 7 on it. With that kind of a price point, I’m really considering it!