| ![Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium UPGRADE [DVD] [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41mlAqlTCyL._SL500_.jpg)
| From: Microsoft Software
List Price: $159.95
Buy New: $54.99
You Save: $104.96 (66%)
New (21) Used (8) from $44.99
Rating:  280 reviews
Sales Rank: 1391
Format: Dvd-rom
Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows Xp, Windows Vista Home Basic
Media: DVD-ROM
Edition: Upgrade
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Windows XP
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 6 x 2 x 8
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
MPN: 882224173056
Model: 66I-00003
UPC: 882224173056
EAN: 0882224173056
ASIN: B000HCZ9BG
Release Date: January 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 26-30 of 280
 Vista, Moore and Homer Simpson October 4, 2007
Raj Budhabhatti (Hawaii)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
Sorry, Amazone will not take a negative 1 star for vista!
Vista, Moore and Homer Simpson
How do they tie together?
Gordon Moore, Chairman of Intel made a self fulfilling prophecy that every 18 months his engineers managed to pack twice as many transistors in same silicon area. And became partly responsible for filling up the landfills, changing India into major exporter of C++ speaking programmers, American suburbs into Springfields housing Simpson clone families, and of course turn Microsoft into Umbrella corporation and windows into T-virus that you can not run away from. If he had made wrong observation and said 12 months, we would be on turbo ride to doom. He could have said 24 months and our doom buggy would run at the speed of Windows Vista.
But what is wrong with windows Vista?
It is different. Changes are good; the cliche' goes.
Yes, it is different but for sake of being different. Smart people realize that being different for no good reason is no good. Richard Fynman invented a whole set of symbols he used in his mathematics, and realized that it was stupid. Being helpful and humble (one heck of a guy and smart enough to later bag Nobel for Physics) he promptly corrected his mistake and went back to using the good old symbols used by everyone from Newton to Ramanujan to Hawking. Microsoft, the all powerful god of our times does not need to be humble, smart. They could buy Nobel and all the heck of guys including me and you. Their armies of programmers had to be fed and kept busy, like the armies of Temur. Feed them, keep them fighting, they will land you the world. Keep them idle, they will destroy all. Leave these programmers, they will go invent something useful instead of day after day coding lines of useless changes.
What is different in Vista?
Menu's are in different places, icons are called different names and do different things and since darn Moore said 18 months to double density of transistors, they reasoned that the same CPU will run twice as fast so they could let vista eat twice as much computation power and so Johanny will need a new computer in 18 months so he could play Doom at the same speed without getting frustrated. Mom and dad will very willingly buy a new laptop with Centrino Duo double core processor (the 18 month rule is gagging to keep alive; need two processors) and old one goes to landfill, everyone is happy, parent happy to give out guilt money and food chain from Micorsoft down to the lowly computer tech happy to take it.
And yet, the real meat is still the same. It takes several clicks to get to Internet properties and there, the real tech stuff goes back to the old XP, a far cay from the earlier windows that was bad enough. In nutshell, as my boss would say; "it is a dressed up pig." Insides of vista are just as rotten but we were used to it, outsides are dressed up so much that we have to learn it again! It is a damn operating system; and anyone who understands, operation system is just a necessary evil. I may want to spend my time learning an application like Autocad or Photoshop, not the operating system. I would put it this way: If I want to build an aero plane, vista is like spending my time learning the psychology of my union worker rather then aerodynamics. Search function does not search, control panel icons (even under the "classical view") are moved, renamed and cryptic. The funny thing about Control panel in classical view is that if you did get it to do something the program pops up a window literally telling us: "Did it work? Wow! Well then"
Remember that good old add/remove programs icon? Look for it now. The networking icon opens windows where there are strange selection items that don't mean much which is fine because even if they did mean anything, you are just going to face meaningless windows popping up. Useless warnings bounce around, eating your CPU cycles, printers and other attachments don't work or you have to download drivers that don't download or if they do, they don't really work. But the all knowing Microsoft marketing has the answer. You can run vista in dual mode: vista and XP on the same machine. Of course you have to buy vista and XP for those law abiding zombies. If I had my choice, I would be in business of selling bikinis (Less for more) and vista (More for bad) With vista, they screw up and we pay for the old screw up and the new screw up.
Maybe I don't appreciate the millions poured in vista product definition. To keep programmers busy, they had to design a "new" operating system (WHY?) that is easy to use (read, designed for Simpson's. If you are not one, you will be one.) And so here is my connection; poor Moore made an innocent observation. The industry took it to heart and lived by it. So did Mark Goering of Simpson's who had an image of middle class American family and made a show so popular that the middle class American family rose to fill up that that mould. Vista, figuring that they had to write software that would do the same thing as its predecessor but at twice the CPU power brought us vista. They decided to use their armies of Tartars (oops, programmers) but having run out of creative juices and drunk on power they decided to make the vista that even Homer could use it. And so, slowly but steadily we wind down to Homerian stage of evolution.
If you have not yet figured out, my suggestion is, next time when the Moore's 18 month period has your computer in blues and you have to buy a new one, stick to bad XP and avoid the ugly vista. Unless you are a sadist who enjoys learning operating systems.
 Not worth the headache, yet. February 4, 2007
T. Kelly (USA)
12 out of 17 found this review helpful
Vista may be a good upgrade a year down the road, but not yet.
Many hardware manufacturers have no drivers for vista.
Looks nice on the eyes, but works as slow as windows 95.
Will give it another try after its been out a while. But for now I will stick with xp pro. I like speed and stability.
Not worth it February 6, 2007
Joshua Glowzinski (Earth)
12 out of 20 found this review helpful
I was really looking forward to this. I went the day it came out and bought it from best buy, after they told me it would work with my Sony Vaio pc. I got it home and installed it. When it was installing I had to delete my Norton Internet Security and my external HD program. Then when it finally installed nothing worked. My keyboard, my outlook abd many other programs. I called Best Buy and they said they would install it. So there went 130 dollars from my pocket. Then I got it home after 4 days (when I had just had it there for a week getting windows xp reinstalled.) I got it homw and couldn't wait. It still did not work. I bring it in and they say "oh well your video card is not the correct kind. If you get one we will install it free." So there went 180 dollars more out of my pocket. Then I get it home and the video card makes my pc monitor go off after 10 minutes. As it had a year before. So not I havespent about $600 at best buy trying to get vista working. I am going to return vista tomorrow and tell them I want my money I paid them to install it back. Vista is not worth everything you have to go through. You get it and you will probably have to upgrade your memory, video card, hard drive ect. If you have ever seen the comerchial with the mac and pc guy and the mac is asking him why he's upset and the pc guy is saying because hey are installing vista in me IT IS 100% TRUE. I will soon be getting an apple lap top. But forget about vista. Its like taking a new cold pill that makes you worse and makes you have to get all kinds of medical work done on yourself after you tke it. Shame on you Microsoft. SHAME!!!!
Caution Ahead February 11, 2007
MJS (New York, United States)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
I am stunned at how poorly Microsoft has handled Windows Vista. Like several other reviewers, I ran the Vista diagnostic before purchasing and was told only one program wouldn't work. After install 5 programs wouldn't work and, you guessed it, it's not the fault of Vista. The programs are "old." All of 6 months old in one case and not more than 18 months in any. So now I need to add a video accelerator card to access most of Vista's features. Ok. But my computer is only 18 months old and it's hardly a paperweight. And why didn't the diagnostic tell me this? I would have bought the card at the same time.
But the real reason to stay away from Vista is the sheer awfulness of Microsoft's "support." Three times now I've tried to get help from the Online Chat and each time has been worse and NONE has provided an answer better than "we are aware of the issue." Serious issues, btw. Each time the "tech rep" spent more time trying to convince me to give them my phone number than answering my question. The "dialogue" was literally canned - the exact same language each time. And it took forever. The shortest chat was 45 minutes and the longest was over 90 minutes. All that for no actual solution.
Save your money and stay with XP.
Resource hungry monster. April 6, 2007
Thomas J. Mcburney (Sydney, Australia)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
The first time I started Windows Vista on my brand new notebook computer, I was shocked to find it using 650mb of RAM just booting it up. Right away I had to battle with lots of issues with incompatible software that was working fine on my Windows XP. I have read that there is already a number of security vulnerabilities that need patching and also computer security experts are criticising the design of Vista. Things like Internet Explorer are integrated into the OS, so if a hacker finds an exploit in IE, then they have found an exploit in the OS! Same goes with media player.
The company I work for has over 150 PC's running Windows XP. Windows Vista has almost rendered every machine out of date due to the amount of processing power, memory, video requirements, and disk space requirements of Windows Vista. For what benefit? Cool aero effect? Microsoft can stick that up their bum! I was expecting to continue doing the stuff I normally do on XP except with some improvements, I didn't get that from Vista. I want real operating system features, not just cool special effects. I want a OS that goes fast, is efficient, is secure, is well designed, without stupid restrictions, is not over priced, is flexible, does not change radically every few years, and does not annoy me with stupid prompts when I do something.
It definitely has the wow factor, like "wow, look at how much memory its eating up!". "Wow, look at how slow my computer is now!". "Wow, nothing works!".
I guess it is clear now the direction Microsoft Windows is heading in. In the future we can expect it will just keep getting bigger and more bloated. There will be more restrictions, security flaws will still be part of the design of Windows, it will be slower, it will require a more powerful PC, it will cost more, it will have more cool special effects and upgrading will be painful.
As a result of my Vista experience I went and downloaded Ubuntu, which is free, so I tried it out. I was very happy with it, it just works. It only used 150 Mb of RAM when booted up, and my machine ran like a rocket. It's a shame that all my current Windows software does not run on it unless I install a Windows emulator, otherwise I would go to Ubuntu. For the mean time I will stick to my Windows XP, everything works fine and it performs well. I don't get what Vista is trying to achieve, I'm not impressed at all.
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