licence again

[Barry Watzman]

Your answer seems to ignore the fact that Newegg and other legitimate
resellers are selling OEM copies of Windows "stand alone" (with no
hardware) and with Express Upgrade coupon. All of this is fully legal,
and clearly nothing is bios-locked to anything (since no hardware is
involved).

Further, regard your comment that "I would not buy an OEM copy of XP
just to get an Express Upgrade coupon. The purpose of OEM copies of XP
is to install and run XP on a new computer. Using them as shortcuts to
something else means forever relying on a legacy copy of Windows when
you have to reinstall Vista for some reason."

That logic applies to all "upgrade" versions of Vista, everywhere,
across the board. I'm not totally saying that it's not a valid position
to take, but it discounts the entire concept of upgrade versions.

Personally, I think that the problems and resulting uproar over the
requirement that an activated copy of XP actually be installed before an
upgrade copy of Vista can be used is going to surprise a lot of people.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

But why buy XP OEM to get Vista when you can just buy Vista OEM at launch?
That's my point. Why bother with the whole express upgrade thing at all.
Besides, delivery of OEM Vista will probably be sooner than the mid March it
will take to get the redeemed Express Upgrade copy.

 

[Barry Watzman]

For starters, because it's cheaper; XP Media Center is selling for $110;
the price of a full version Vista Home Premium copy is about twice that.

As a secondary reason, although it may not comply with the EULA (a fact
about which some people could care less), it MAY be physically possible
to create a dual boot combination with the copy of XP and the Vista upgrade.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Barry, buying XP OEM to get a Vista Express Upgrade coupon is not cheaper
than just buying Vista OEM at the end of January. Why bother with the XP
piece? Just get Vista. Anyway, it takes longer to get Vista with the
Express Upgrade coupon; about mid-March.

You can say what you like about the EULA and I won't argue that. But folks
are going to do this regardless so my thought is they should at least do it
sensibly.

There is no need to buy XP OEM now to get a coupon and wait for mid-March to
get Vista when they can just buy Vista OEM at the end of January. It just
does not make sense to me.

Of course the retailers aren't advertising Vista OEM yet. But they can't
deliver on the Express Upgrade coupon yet either, so folks should just wait.

If folks wanting OEM Vista could look at an ad that had:
XP OEM plus a coupon for Vista
and
Vista OEM
side by side (as they will be able to see in a few weeks) why would they
order the XP?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Dual booting XP and Vista is inadvisable because of the volsnap.sys
incompatibility.

 

[Barry Watzman]

Re: "Barry, buying XP OEM to get a Vista Express Upgrade coupon is not
cheaper than just buying Vista OEM at the end of January."

I'll bet it is. XP Media Center is about $110 (Newegg). You get the
upgrade to Vista Home PREMIUM free. I'll bet that the OEM version of
Vista Home Premium is at least $160. [I do agree that most people
probably won't see the upgrade until late Feb. or sometime in March.]

 

[Barry Watzman]

Say what you will, I think it will be nuts NOT to have XP still on your
system for at least a year or more, while lots of things are unsupported
and incompatible.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Please search on this newsgroup for "volsnap.sys" and review the issue.
Booting into XP will destroy the volume shadowcopy services snapshots in
Vista unless the Vista volume is hidden from XP. This means most of the
recovery techniques for previous versions of files, system restore points,
backups, and more. This has been discussed in detail several time in this
and vista.setup newsgroups.