Pricing of Microsoft Windows Vista

Seeing the very high list prices for the "complete" versions of Vista is a little disappointing. I don't use Windows very much, but I find the flexibility of a dual boot Linux/Windows PC to be useful. For my work, I use fairly inexpensive PCs and Macs because except for rare machine learning runs, I don't need many fast CPU cycles for my work. Because I tend to buy low cost commodity PCs, the relative price of an increase in the "Microsoft tax" is noticeable.

If Microsoft does anything to prevent easy dual booting between Linux and Windows, then that will be the day that I stop using Windows (or at least stop buying new PCs with Windows). With the latest version of Ubuntu, I prefer Linux as a development platform even to OS X.

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