Reading about the internal emails at Microsoft, in which its own people queried the fact that low-end laptops would be labelled as "Vista-capable", when in fact they'd only be able to run one version of Vista - the "Home Basic", which doesn't have the Aero interface (or most other "Vista" features apart from User Access Control and "better" wireless networking), I've realised there's a question about this stuff to which I don't know the answer.
It's this: if you're buying a new machine - desktop or laptop - in a shop and it's got Vista on, which version do you get? If you say "I like Machine X" and it comes with Vista Business, but you want Ultimate, do you have to buy a retail copy of Ultimate, or can they take the machine out the back and, you know, persuade it to have Ultimate? What's the delta (price difference to the rest of ya) between the version you're offered and the one you might want?
And if you can choose, rather than being saddled with whatever's on the machine, is it enough? It seems that once you start having the choice between different machines, with different RAM and hard drive configurations and screen sizes, that if you then have to consider which version of the OS you're going for too that it all starts to move into "paralysing choice" territory.
(I just had a look on Dell's site, and upgrading an Inspiron - which apparently naturally gravitates to (deep breath) Windows Vista Home Premium - to Ultimate costs an extra £70. That's about half of the difference at retail, according to Amazon UK, which offers them for £214.98 and £344.98 respectively.)
So come on, enlighten us: have you bought a Vista machine recently? Did you have a choice about the OS version? Did you want a choice? And if you did, what was the price difference?
