Vista Family Discount Keys Found Not Compatible 394
acousticiris writes "Many (if not all) users who took advantage of Microsoft's Vista Family Discount have been issued invalid installation keys and cannot install Windows Vista Home Premium. Microsoft says, 'There is no expected time period for a fix at this time.' According to the article, the keys are valid for something, just not Windows Vista. Perhaps it's just too simple to issue these folks new keys and send them on their way."
Re:Upgrade does not include Vista Premium.. (Score:5, Informative)
The program is basically this: If you bought a retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate, you can buy two additional upgrade licenses for $50 each. These upgrade licenses are for Windows Vista Home Premium - i.e. you don't get two more Ultimate licenses, you get 2 home premium upg licenses. Hence the bit about home premium.
Mod parent up; GP down (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not Surprised... (Score:3, Informative)
YMMV, but I doubt it.
It's just another non-story, another chance for the geek to vent his rage against the universe. Vista has moved into the home market, where its dominance is as certain as the rising of the sun:
You have to wonder how long the crowd here will continue grasping at straws:
I just tested this out for myself. If you received a free copy of Vista from your participation in the beta program, the Ultimate key you were issued qualifies for the Windows Vista Family Discount. How's THAT for a discount!
Now, if only they could issue correct PID keys for the Home Premium installations...
Speaking of which, if you were issued a bad key, just install Vista without it. When it asks for the Product Key, just select "Next", then chose "Home Premium" as your edition, and continue as usual. Then, when Microsoft sends you the right key, you can add it to your system. Vista Beta Reward Product Keys and the Vista Family Discount [windows-now.com]
Re:Paid customers getting the shaft? (Score:5, Informative)
and a follow up from another poster:
Re:Why would they subject themselves to this? (Score:5, Informative)
All major OSes get some bloat as they grow. Vista's sheer size is inexcusable, but it's not terribly slower than XP, at least on a 1.6GHz P4 notebook.
Re:Paid customers getting the shaft? (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent Funny.
Re:Unacceptable (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why would they subject themselves to this? (Score:4, Informative)
I run Tiger on a 900 MHz G3 iBook all the time. It's very usable. And my experience concurs with the GP's experience: it does seem significantly faster than Panther. However Tiger does require more RAM than Panther. If you don't have enough RAM, your computer will be paging to your hard drive pretty heavily, which could make Tiger appear slower than Panther. Add more RAM if you think Tiger is slower than Panther. Chances are, you just don't have enough.
That said, until you've booted Mac OS X public beta in 32 Megs of RAM, though, you don't know the definition of slow, and thus have no room to complain.... :-)
Re:Alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why would they subject themselves to this? (Score:5, Informative)
X11 is the device-independent driver upon which GUIs (KDE, GNOME, GnuSTEP, XFCE...) are built.
Re:Why would they subject themselves to this? (Score:5, Informative)
No shit? Linux From Scratch is hard to maintain? I'm shocked! Shocked! Did you really just say that Linux From Scatch was hard to maintain, so you stopped using Linux? Linux From Scratch is meant to teach the deep inner workings of Linux, it's not supposed to be easy to maintain. There are dozens of Linux distros meant to be "easy to use", but you went ahead and picked the one that's purposely difficult? I don't think Linux From Scratch is your problem here.
Debian's testing branch is more stable than your LFS, it's current within a week of new software releases, and you can get daily automatic updates with a click of a button. I'm sure you'll point out some reason the average user is too stupid to do that, but it's a hell of a lot easier than LFS.
Why should I, as a user, have to worry about libraries? I shouldn't. And with a distro like Debian or SuSe, I don't. I open Synaptic, click on the application I want, click "Apply", and the application is installed along with any necessary libraries. Oh, and it'll automatically get updated along with the rest of the system. Try doing that on Mac or Windows.
As a developer, I still don't see your point. It makes very little difference to me if I'm using the API built into the OS, or a third party library. In one case I'll have to add a line to the build scripts. Big fuckin' deal.
Re:Why would they subject themselves to this? (Score:3, Informative)
Building a kernel with just the drivers you want to use was one of the first post-installation jobs of FreeBSD.
You can't even boot Linux from a floppy no more
The main OSes are big balls of cruft bloated horribly by the 80/20 rule for general purpose computing but only the OSS ones allow you to do something about it.
Even then you still face the possible time penalty of recompiling userland. That's why I'm glad plan9 only takes 15 mins to make world.
Re:Upgrade does not include Vista Premium.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why would they subject themselves to this? (Score:3, Informative)
Hum, I can boot linux on a single floppy and make it my firewall with all the needed utilities. For exemple with Coyote Linux [coyotelinux.com]...
Re:family values (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Paid customers getting the shaft? (Score:3, Informative)
A resolution straight from a dude at Microsoft... (Score:2, Informative)
The Vista Family Discount (VFD) team has found the problem with the product keys. Turns out they are not Vista Keys. The VFD team is working on a fix and will email out new keys to everyone with in 4-5 days.
If your key does not work; odds are its one of the bad ones. If you do not hear back from the VFD team with a new key next week; I would send them an email or call:
email: vistafamilydiscount[AT]one.microsoft.upgrade.com
Phone: 1-800-835-0663
I hope this helps! Thanks and sorry for any issues... -Doug