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Price of Windows 8 Upgrade To Rise! - Page 2

post #31 of 36
1/22/13 at 12:41pm
$199 is the suggested retail price. I'd be surprised if any retailer actually sells it for that considering the current pricing structure. You'd think Windows 8 would be flying off the shelves at the current price, but all reports I've seen indicate sales are pretty sluggish. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Microsoft extend the current "sale" price after January. You'd have to be a complete idiot to pay $199 for it.
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post #32 of 36
1/22/13 at 1:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by captain_video View Post

The two motherboards I own that have UEFI BIOS both use CPUs with integrated graphics. My sole Win 8 PC boots way faster than either of them and it uses a fairly old nVidia graphics card and does not have UEFI BIOS. It's also a fairly basic setup with an SSD for the OS, optical drive, and 2nd hard drive for files. The unRAID server uses an AMD A4 Illano CPU, but it also has two Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-port SATA controllers and it has to poll each drive connected to it so it takes a while. The other is my HTPC which has two InfiniTV4 cablecard tuners, a Hauppauge 2250 and an AverMedia Duet ATSC tuner and also an Intel PCI-e NIC. It takes time to initialize all of the devices and boot into Windows. The point being that boot time is dependent on lots of things other than just having a UEFI compliant graphics card. No doubt it may help shave a few seconds off, but you're still at the mercy of the OS to get everything else up and running.

Yes, Win8 is much faster for booting due to the way it works - which does not invalidate what I said. smile.gif If you want to use the fastest boot up UEFI has to offer you need a video card which supports it. AFAIK, none are available yet.
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post #33 of 36
1/22/13 at 1:06pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by captain_video View Post

$199 is the suggested retail price. I'd be surprised if any retailer actually sells it for that considering the current pricing structure. You'd think Windows 8 would be flying off the shelves at the current price, but all reports I've seen indicate sales are pretty sluggish. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Microsoft extend the current "sale" price after January. You'd have to be a complete idiot to pay $199 for it.

While there are a LOT of improvements under the hood - there is no compelling reason to upgrade if you are a normal user. I agree with you, the $199 price most likely will never be seen by the actual consumer other than a "you save $XX dollars off the normal price of $199!!!".
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post #34 of 36
1/22/13 at 3:29pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by cybrsage View Post

While there are a LOT of improvements under the hood - there is no compelling reason to upgrade if you are a normal user. I agree with you, the $199 price most likely will never be seen by the actual consumer other than a "you save $XX dollars off the normal price of $199!!!".

I'm not sure if there's much of a speed difference between booting in Win7 and Win8, but there's a huge difference between Vista and Win8. Well worth $39.00 IMHO.

And I suspect the ability to run Metro apps will become much more important as time passes. For example, you can now get about 5 free loan calculators on Metro. That said, I know AMD and others are working on ways to run Android apps in Windows, so perhaps the ability to run Metro apps won't be very important to most people.
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post #35 of 36
1/25/13 at 3:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mfusick View Post

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/buy?ocid=CPRP_r_january13_na_body_1_1

Still wondering if I want to spend the $40 just to stock pile it away ???
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post #36 of 36
1/25/13 at 4:38pm
I took the plunge and upgraded to 8 on my HTPC about a month ago. I was running Vista. Considering the price and the existence of Classic Shell (if you never want to use the new Start screen), I think the upgrade is a no brainer. If CS didn't exist or the price was higher, I would go with W7. Thankfully neither is the case!
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