Windows 7 Pricing Follow Up

This post is a quick followup to my rant piece from a couple of days ago about Windows 7 upgrade pricing. I’ve since found some not quite so nasty pricing and that maybe Home Premium is all I need after all.

Windows 7 Pricing in New Zealand

The prices noted here are in New Zealand Dollars and are for copies of Windows 7 from retailers in New Zealand. Here’s a couple of places I’ve found offering it a little lower than RRP. Prices are for the upgrade or OEM version and include GST.

* A note about PBTech pricing: they are having a sale this weekend (being Labour Weekend) so for this weekend the prices are about $10 to $20 cheaper than quoted above. I don’t have yesterday’s newspaper on me which featured the ad so can only get pricing from the website which doesn’t have the sale price.

** For some reason QMB have different prices for the 32/64 bit version of Home Premium, and only have the 32 bit versions listed for Professional and Ultimate.

Note that the RRP/DSE/PBTech are prices for the full retail box upgrade (at least they are according to their website) and Zcom/QMB are for OEM non-upgrade versions. From my understanding, strictly speaking the OEM version is not supposed to be sold directly to the end user without some hardware but it doesn’t stop the retailers and there’s nothing to prevent you actually installing them.

Also do more of a search around and you may find even better pricing around the place.

Which Version?

After having a look at the features comparison chart, I can’t really see any reason to buy the Professional or Ultimate versions for my own purposes. I already a series of Virtual Machines with VMWare Server for testing stuff in older versions of Internet Explorer (the legacy apps I need to test), and don’t need the backup or data protection offered in the "better" versions.

In any case, I can still run the Release Candidate for another 6 months until I need to worry about what I’m going to do. There may be even better pricing available then.