I am considering buying a bundled package and just about every combo has the
Home Premium version of Vista loaded. Fax/Scan is so basic it should be in
the Basic version. To not include it in the Premium version is hard to
believe. To add insult to injury, it appears there is no way to even pay for
it to later include it. The product manager who came up with this concept
better go back to class. You are infuriating people.
"*You* are infuriating people"?
Just in case you're confused, let me make it very clear: this isn't
Microsoft you're addressing, and you're wasting your (figurative)
breath by complaining here.
This is a peer support newsgroup. We are all just Windows Vista users
here, helping each other if and when we can. We are not Microsoft
employees (not even those of us with "Microsoft MVP" behind our names;
that's an honorary title for having provided consistently helpful
advice) except for an occasional employee who posts here unofficially
on his own time.
If you want to complain to Microsoft, do so directly. Complaining here
does nothing but irritate those people who might be able to help you
with problems in the future. Some of us agree with you, by the way,
and others don't.
And to address your issue, let me point out the following:
1. What edition of Vista is bundled with the computers you are
considering buying is the choice of the manufacturers of those
computers, not Microsoft. If you don't like their choices, complain to
them, not Microsoft.
2. If I go the Dell web site, and look at the computers they offer,
almost every one of them gives you the choice of upgrading the edition
of Vista to a higher level. I assume that most other vendors do the
same.
3. Even if none of the manufacturers offer bundles that meet your
particular needs, nobody is forcing you to buy a bundle at all. You
always have the choice of having a computer custom-built and
installing whatever version of whatever operating system you want.
4. Microsoft made the decision to create five different editions of
Vista: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.
Each of these has a different set of features and a different price.
They did this so each person could choose which feature set he needed
or wanted and perhaps save some money over buying everything.
If Home Basic and Home Premium came with additional features, such as
fax, Microsoft would presumably have charged more for them. That
penalizes those people who otherwise would have wanted one of the Home
editions, but have no need for faxing.
5. If you worked for Microsoft and were in charge of coming up with
five different editions, and choosing what features would be in each,
you would have done it differently. Ok, we understand that. But you
need to realize that if I were the one in charge, I would probably
have come up with a third breakdown of features, and someone else a
still different way of doing it.
The point is that there are many ways of doing this, and no single one
is ever going to be right for everyone. However you do it, there is
always going to be someone who doesn't get a feature he wants, and
someone else who has to pay for a feature he doesn't use.
6. Notwithstanding all of the above, there's an easy solution to your
problem: just buy third-party fax software. There are several
inexpensive choices. Since I've never used any of them, I'll let
someone else recommend one, but here are a couple of choices I've seen
recommended:
http://www.rkssoftware.com/rksfax/overview.html $19.95
http://www.snappysoftware.com/index.html $29.99
7. Alternatively, buy a standalone fax machine. That's my choice. I
bought mine on sale for $20, and it works just fine.
