Actually, my wife did. Not for work, mind you. The only Windows “machine” we have in our home is a BootCamp installation for gaming on son’s Mac mini. My wife is a student, and there is currently an offer for every UK student with .ac.uk email address to buy Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for £30.
It is impossible to find the link to the offer on the Microsoft site. Their search comes with no results when you search for ‘student’ or ‘education’. I had to google it, which is pretty poor indicator of Microsoft website usability (though this is nothing new). Or maybe it’s me, foolishly expecting websites to be simple and easy.
We entered the email address and got the email with the actual store link. Chose Windows 7 Professional Upgrade instead of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade (a no-brainer since the cost was the same £30, an interesting business plan there which I don’t get). Made the purchase and got a product code and two links: one to an ISO (or so we thought) and an EXE that one was supposed to run in Windows to upgrade it. Now, our plan was to reinstall from scratch as it was a 64-bit version and we had a Windows 7 32-bit beta. But there came the surprise: the link to ISO was actually a link to an ISO downloader program which can only be run from Windows, and we purchased it from a Mac. An upgrade indeed.
Little annoyances like this is why I try to minimise my contacts with Microsoft software, at least when I’m not at work.
Or maybe it’s me, foolishly expecting websites to be simple and easy.
— Rolex watches · 26 July 2010, 07:33 · #