If only available as an upgrade then it's less of a deal. A lot of home builders will have to buy a full retail version regardless. Is there any mention of a non-upgrade family pack?

Three letters: OEM, that's really all that matters for most home builders.

wow that is great, people will be able to get the f*ck out of vista...

I think it's a great idea. If I could get os's that cheap, I might start buying them.

I suspect a lot of people will be doing 'family pack' installations whether or not they release one to the public. Now, I know a lot of pirates who won't pay for it, of which I have sworn of piracy myself and switched to free open source software. But the people that I know that do buy software don't understand or don't care about the idea of user licenses. A dvd works in any device, you can buy, sell or trade console games and thats the way it is. Whether you agree with the concept of user licenses or not, this a significant source of "piracy" for honest consumers. 20-30 dollars more is better then 0-0 dollars more and microsoft would be smart to offer such an option.

Not gonna lie, I bought the OEM Vista x64 Home Premium and I don't plan on spending any hard earned (in this crap economy) cash on Windows 7 until I see some noticeable gaming performance increases or something else big. As of now, I installed the newest RC from the M$ website and it just looks OK to me, doesn't seem different visually or performance wise but then again I have a 3.8GHz Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM and SLI 8800GT so Vista was never an issue.

I also am NOT a fan of the way you minimize windows in W7. I hate how they all clusterfook in to the little icon like if you open several Firefox windows and minimize them they pretty much disappear and you have to hover the dam mouse over the small Firefox icon and wait for a "live view" popup and THEN decide which window you want based off a small picture, THEN click on it. I like having crap in my task bar when I minimize it, not hiding inside an icon in my task bar. I would imaging I could change that functionality but to me its lame as-is.

Basically I am mad that I spent moneyz on Vista and they come out with Windows 7 a small amount of time later, patting themselves on the back for such great turn-around time....

NeoDude, just go into the taskbar properties and change the icons from collapsing always to only when the taskbar is full and you will get the results you want. Just an FYI.

Um, Windows 7 didn't have a quick turnaround time from Vista. It will almost 3 years. Just because XP was around for 7 years, doesn't mean that should be the standard with an OS.

XP got so obsolete by the time Vista come out it was ridiculous.

Try installing RAID or AHCI on XP without slipstreaming. IT WANTS A FLOPPY DISK.

Hmmm bardia, you do have some point about oldschool XP cds and a lack of drivers. You definetly need to go about that stuff in a more 'techy' way by slipsteaming or having floppy (AND the drive itself....) to do some of those things. I also love that Vista already knows how to use my onboard network and I believe sound too, without having to have drivers laying around. How am I supposed to run updates if the PC can't go online... sigh USB hard drives / flash drives to the rescue.

As for quick turnaround I suppose I meant from the time I purchased Vista. Newegg says I bought it 11/5/2007 so its was only about a year and a half ago, oh how time flies.

Family Pack=win if the rumors are true. I was contemplating buying 1 copy while this half off sale is going on but now I'll wait to see if this family pack is a go. I have 5 computers in house and would go for at least one round of Windoz 7 on the primary computers. Xp will stay on the 2 laptops.

Give me a full retail (not upgrade) family pack of Win7 Home premium for $80 and then we're talking. I wouldn't hesitate upgrading my whole house even though I fully support Linux and hate having to be stuck with Windows, I'd do it anyway just because I can't refuse a price like that. Luckily we know it will never happen so MS will not get all of us WinXP and Linux stragglers.

hmmmm. I have a laptop htpc and desktop, a 3 pack would be nice. I'd prefer if the retail was that price though, not an upgrade.

That being said, I am reinstalling the OS on my laptop tonight, and don't really care enough to bother with windows 7, Vista just hasn't been a problem for me. So Vista will be reloaded and the ISO for Windows 7 will continue to site on my desktop hard drive unused.

But will MS enforce the single user license packs so strictly? Who here hasn't had their legally purchased OS running concurrently on more systems than the license allows for?

Perhaps they hope people won't want to take the risk to find out, or that they can prevent any potential activation problems with the family pack...