Taking a beating with Windows 7 pricing

When you buy a PC what do you think the single most expensive part? Is it the CPU? Nope. The hard drive? No way. It's long been Windows, and, with the coming of Windows 7 on netbooks and lower-priced PCs, Windows may not only be the priciest part, it may cost you more than everything else in the PC combined. Now, that's real value for your money!

Windows 7 Starter Edition is expected to cost netbook vendors $50. That's not much, but it's a good deal more than the $15, and less, it currently costs them to put Windows XP Home on their machines. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft has decided that Starter Edition can only go on a netbooks with a 10.2-in. Or smaller screen , with no more than 1GB of RAM, a hard disk drive of no more than 250GB or a solid-state drive no bigger than 64GB, and a single-core processor no faster than 2 GHz.

In short, if a netbook manufacturer wants to produce a high-end netbook, Microsoft is forcing them to use Windows 7 Home Premium. And, guess what? According to a report, Mike Abary, a senior VP at Sony's Vaio PC unit, says that Windows 7 Home Premium will "add $200 to a unit's cost." On an advanced netbook, or low-end notebook, that could easily mean that Windows is the most expensive part of the entire package.

It's not just the vendors that Microsoft is playing pricing games with. Microsoft has done a great job so far in flimflamming the buying public about Windows 7's pricing so far. First, there's the wildly popular Windows 7 pre-order. The Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade, priced at $49.99 and available, at most, until July 11, moved to the top of Amazon's sales list.

What a deal right? Well, as that 'deal' comes to a close, did you know that it appears Microsoft will be offering a Family Pack of Windows 7. And, that package, good for three computers, may have the same, or lower, price for Windows 7 as the Windows 7 discount deal. As you might imagine, some Windows users aren't happy.

Of course, at least would be Windows 7 customers in North America get some kind of discounts. In Europe, users can expect to pay up to twice as much for Windows 7.

Microsoft, of course, claims that this isn't the case It's just that, in Europe, Bill Veghte, senior VP for the Windows business group, explained, "We typically offer two Windows versions to retail customers: a full version for use on any computer and an upgrade version -- at a lower price -- that can only be used on computers that are already licensed for Windows." But, "In light of recent changes we made to European versions of Window 7, we will not have an upgrade version available in Europe when we release the new operating system."

For those of you poor devils who've been stuck with Vista, Microsoft is also making it clear that you won't be getting a free pass to Windows 7 even if you paid big bucks for Vista Ultimate There's no discount packages available for would-be Windows 7 Ultimate users. Some Vista Ultimate users hoped that they'd get a free upgrade to Windows 7. Forget about it. It's not going to happen.

Last, but never least, let's not forget that, just like Vista before it, the different editions of Windows 7 are just a giant shell game designed to fool you into spending every last dime from your wallet. Figuring out which version of Windows 7 will have the features you need at the price you can afford is a subject I'll take up when we're closer to seeing Windows 7 actually getting delivered.

Until then, let me just say that a good desktop Linux, like Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 11, and openSUSE 11.1 won't cost you a penny and that when Apple upgrades its operating system to Snow Leopard, it will cost you $29. Period. No extra charges. No half-a-dozen different versions with different requirements and features sets. Apple and the Linux vendors just deliver the goods, not a beating with their desktop operating system offerings. Too bad Microsoft won't follow their lead. Of course, so long as Windows users are willing to pay to be abused, I guess we can count on Microsoft continuing to beat on them.