Sorry to hear about your run-in with Snow Leopard.  Almost more sorry to see the clicktards at Infoworld are using it as a way of equating it to Vista (sorry – no clickthrus for clicktards).  Two upgrades here – no problems.  But I’ve been where you are.  Hope you cloned your drive with SuperDuper or something and didn’t do anything silly like dive right into the upgrade.  That way you could always go back to 10.5 until all the bugs in this half-baked point-something-upgrade get worked out.  A guy with so much going on shouldn’t take chances.

I’m not here to call out Merlin like he claims a lot of his Mactard peers are doing. I have too much love for the M².  I wish him the best and hope he gets back on track soon.

Get well soon bro.

/Jesus peace

TMA

Buying a PC now (actually starting tomorrow)‚ your upgrade to Win 7 is free when it’s released on October 22. What you get depends on what version of Vista your OEM stuck you with:

Vista Home Premium -> Windows 7 Home Premium
Vista Business -> Win 7 Professional
Vista Ultimate -> Win 7 Ultimate
Vista Home Basic -> Suck It

Buying any boxed version of Vista not tied to a PC?

See “Vista Home Basic”‚ above.

But Redmond has some further incentive for you to act now! For a limited time‚ if you order Windows 7‚ you can get “Special Offer” pre-order pricing:

Windows 7 Home Premium – $50,
Windows 7 Professional – $100
Windows 7 Ultimate – Suck It

So how do we know when the “Special Offer” ends? From Gizmodo:

“What’s this about a limited time? Mike Ybarra, general manager of Windows Product Management, told me that the pre-order deal will go away when a certain undisclosed number of licenses is sold. ‘We have enough quantity,’ he said, adding that the magic number was ‘equivalent to a year of Vista sales volume at retail.’”

Nice. Another asshole marketing trick from the masters of insulting the customer’s intelligence. Problems with Vista? Nah! Stick your head in this “Mojave Experiment” booth for 10 minutes and we’ll prove it’s you‚ dumbass customer‚ who are too ignorant to appreciate Vista’s greatness! People who design these sleight of hand offers should have their balls tazered.

Speaking of extreme disrespect to genitalia‚ European Union countries won’t have the option to upgrade to Win 7. Sure‚ they’ll have the same pricing and even the same “Special Offer”‚ but because the EU went and made M$ chop their web browser from the install‚ you’ll have to do a clean install of the operating system in order to use Win 7. “What about my apps?” you might hear a poor French person exclaim. “Va te faire foutre” would be the response to that one. See what happens when you fuck with Microsoft‚ EU? YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Update: apparently M$ is going to stick EU customers for the full price of the software‚ behind the reasoning that a clean install requires the full version. Pricing until the end of the year £80 ($112) for Home Premium‚ £190 ($267) for Professional and £200 ($280) for Ultimate; after that £150‚ £220 and £230‚ respectively. Yet another reason for Euros to hate America.

In closing‚ I’d like to remind readers about Mac OS X Snow Leopard pricing tiers once it is released in September:

Snow Leopard Premium – $29
Snow Leopard Business -$29
Snow Leopard Ultimate -$29
Snow Leopard Basic – $29