Vista Upgrade on E-Bay

There is a Lenovo branded Vista Home Premium upgrade for sale on E-bay right now, if anyone needs one... though I can't imagine why anyone would.

 

Who's the seller? Could you give me the link

 

It's not a legal auction... so I wouldn't touch it.

 

That's debatable...

 

It's like saying if someone bought a copy of WinXP from Best Buy, they could never sell it...

 

No, the upgrade is an OEM upgrade which is (in the case of the Vista Upgrade Program) legally tied to the machine it was purchased with.

An upgrade CD through BB would be a retail version that is transferable.

 

That's funny... when I bought my Inspiron I had a running battle with the folks at Dell for a good couple of weeks about wanting XP instead of Vista. We discussed a whole bunch of options which I'll detail.

First I told them I didn't want Vista, I wanted an XP disk... They said they couldn't send me an XP disk even if I returned my Vista disk. It simply wasn't available on home purchases.

So, I asked them if I could trade it with a friend of mine that also had a Dell notebook, only running XP. I get his XP and he gets my Vista disk. He said that was OK, but cautioned me that I might want to later upgrade? to Vista. He said it should work fine on his notebook. I asked him if this was "legal" and he said it was as far as he was concerned.

Decided to push them a little more... told them I was going to send my computer back if they didn't allow me to swap for an XP OS disk. They called my bluff with an RMA number... Hmmm...

Then I didn't send it back... they e-mailed me, called me at work, called me at home etc. asking when I was going to give them a tracking number.. Told them I decided to keep it but...

I didn't agree with the liecensing agreement and I want to return the Vista disk for a refund. Took them a while to pass this one around... finally after e-mailing back and forth a bunch of times, they offered me a $75 refund if I returned the Vista disk. They'd pay shipping.

I passed... and I just run an OEM version of XP on my Inspiron. I gave the Vista disk to my son, who runs it on his Inspiron 9300...

There is all sorts of discussion on the web regarding this issue and you can get opinions from every corner of the spectrum. Bottom line is, I seriously doubt either Lenovo or Dell give a crap what you do with your disks... why should they? If someone paid $105 for the upgrade disk, they should be able to install it wherever they want since it invalidates the XP license when you install it...

 

Let me run this by you...

I buy a notebook computer... it comes from Dell with WinXP with the promise of an upgrade to Vista if I pay an additional $105 and wait 5 months for it to arrive.

I sell the notebook in the meantime... then I receive my ugrade. Who does the upgrade belong to, the current owner of the computer or the person who purchased the upgrade?

 

Current owner of the computer. Why? Because if that owner were to try to cash in on the Vista Upgrade program with the computer he could not...because you could.