The Windows Premium and the Vista Premium

I have been looking at the new HP Mini 2140 netbooks on sale here in Switzerland. I think they give a good idea of the premium (penalty) you must pay to get a netbook with Windows rather than Linux, and the additional penalty you must pay to get Vista. These numbers are based on the lowest prices found by a Swiss search engine:

- HP 2140, WSVGA, 1 GB memory, 160 GB SATA, Linux: CHF 447.65

- HP 2140, WSVGA, 1 GB memory, 160 GB SATA, XP Home: CHF 491.25

- HP 2140, WSVGA, 2 GB memory, 160 GB SATA, Vista/XP: CHF 629.74

The last system comes preloaded with Vista Business and includes an XP Professional "downgrade" option with included recovery disks.

So that is a difference of 43.60 francs (~ £25 or $40) to get XP instead of Linux preloaded on otherwise identical systems. But then look at the next step! The Vista systems I could find were all Vista Business + XP Professional "downgrade" - I strongly suspect this is because HP and/or their distributors know perfectly well that the Mini is an unusable DOG with Vista loaded. They also all had 2 GB of memory, perhaps in an attempt to make Vista at least tolerable. So what you actually have is a "triple" penalty - you're paying for two versions of Windows, and an additional gigabyte of memory. The whopping difference is 182.11 francs (~ £110 or $160). Wow.

jw 6/4/2009