How do I get my money back?

[TTL]

Seriously - anyone know if/how I can return my Vista Home Premium 64
license/CD and get my money back?

I had been using Suse Linux on my PC for over a year without any issue when
I saw the need to increase RAM to 4Gig due to the large memory footprint of
some of the developer tools I was using (Netbeans/Eclipse/MySql/ etc), some
of which can consume almost 1Gig of memory (talk about bloat). I tried to
find a reliable Linux distro that supported 64 bit plus all my hardware
(newer PC with SATA drives, Nvidia graphics, and I was also using Intel's
fake RAID 0 on two disks - yeah, I know - not real RAID and why should I
have bothered, but that's another story) but could find none that would
function reliably (Fedora Core was closest, but even that one was flaky -
could not reliably logoff - sometimes it would just hang).

So I purchased Vista Home Premium 64 bit to get good support for 4Gig memory
plus future proofing my OS. Didn't go for more full featured version since
most of my other s/w is typically open source (Firefox, Thunderbird, Open
Office, developer tools, etc).

At first, before Vista began installing all the patches and the SP,
everything ran well. It supported my hardware well and had some of the
multi-media features that are typically poorly supported in Linux. In fact
I was so impressed, I even deleted some of my Linux partitions on my
multi-OS machine thinking I would never need most of them again. Sure there
were some irritating quirks in the Vista UI (why does MS insist on diddling
with things that work - if it ain't broke - DON'T FIX IT !!) - but things I
could live with.

Then after umpteen patches and the SP, Vista began to just freeze at random
times, sometimes several times in a day, for no apparent reason and
requiring a reboot to recover. I looked through the event log for any clue
as to what was happening but never found anything. Google'd for the same
issue and saw many reports, different things to try, none of which seemed to
apply to my machine or fix the issue.

Now I've finally given up - too much lost productivity. Will probably go
back to Fedora Core 64 and try to resolve it's flaky behavior (at least I
won't lose any of my work as with Vista).

Which brings me back to the question - I am so fed up with Vista that I
seriously do want my money back. Anyone ever try to get their money back
from Microsoft, anyone ever succeed ?

Thanks,
TTL

PS: Sorry for the long rant - had to get this stuff off my chest.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Microsoft's refund policy on retail box:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/productrefund/refund.mspx

If you purchased OEM full versions, or are outside the designated time
frame, your best method of recouping expenses is ebay.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[DDW]

Seriously - anyone know if/how I can return my Vista Home Premium 64
license/CD and get my money back?

eBay is your only hope. No vendor will give a refund on opened
software - for obvious reasons.

DDW

 

[Alias]

eBay is your only hope. No vendor will give a refund on opened
software - for obvious reasons.

DDW

Yeah, they want you to read the EULA *after* it's too late to get your
money back.

Alias

 

[Rotten Ronny]

Which brings me back to the question - I am so fed up with Vista that I
seriously do want my money back. Anyone ever try to get their money back
from Microsoft, anyone ever succeed ?

Thanks,
TTL

PS: Sorry for the long rant - had to get this stuff off my chest.

You have a hardware issue or possibly a driver issue (unlikely). Fix that
and you will have no issues with Vista. I run Vista64 every day for many
hours and it has never locked up on me. Have you done any ram diagnostics?
Flaky ram will cause issues. Flaky PSU can be a source of lockups.
Overheating cpu or GPU is another area to look at. And then finally we have
the mb itself as a possible culprit.

 

[Alias]

Yeah, they want you to read the EULA *after* it's too late to get your
money back.

Alias

One more thing I forgot. Stay Away from Ubuntu whatever you do. Ubuntu is
crap and doesn't work.

Alias

 

[Alias]

One more thing I forgot.

Your mind?

Stay Away from Ubuntu whatever you do. Ubuntu
is crap and doesn't work.

Yep, your mind.

Alias

 

[TTL]

Think I finally have a handle on what was happening. I know a lot of people
have said they have no issues running Vista64. But are they running the same
programs? I run a very heavily loaded system for development, including
eclipse and/or netbeans, service providers of various sorts (Apache/Tomcat),
MySql, VirtualBox for Linux guest. I will sometime use upwards of 85% of my
4Gig memory. I finally got Performance monitor to capture and flush some
data just before crash (captured data was usually corrupted if capturing at
moment of crash). The monitor reported excessive interrupts, possibly result
of swapping memory in and out of disk (like over 38000 interrupts during
logging period of a couple of minutes - way above normal). I think this
continuous non-stop thrashing is what is ultimately causing Vista to freeze,
probably due to a bug in its handling of virtual memory (my guess).