The long-waited operating system from our overlords in Redmond has just been released, today! Yes, I am talking about Windows Vista, which should have been released world-wide on the 30^th of January.

Now I am pretty sure everyone wants to have their hands on a copy to experience the “wow” factor. So after upgrading your PC to multi-gigahertz of clock cycles and multi-gigabytes of RAM, the real question is, where do you buy the cheapest Windows Vista?

Understand the pricing structure for different products is already confusing. As far a I can tell, there are Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate which you can buy off the shelf — and I know there are other versions that only come in special licensing agreements. With each product level, you can also get either 32 bit or 64 bit. Then there’s upgrade price, complete OS price and OEM price. And then you have academic prices for teachers and students. Argh!!! It’s complicated. Welcome to the world of software licensing.

So far I have only checked out the price at Big W, OfficeWorks, Dick Smith and Harris Technology. You can already see variation in price, and you can always find the best price with some price comparison sites.

Well, maybe the exercise should be left to the readers as at work we have MSDN subscriptions and I am pretty sure Vista comes with them :) Alright I am lazy. How about you share with us where is the cheapest place to buy Windows Vista.