Never Buy Vista Licenses (At Least Not Through Vista)

We have a few Vista licenses at the office, primarily for use as VMs (though that is unnecessary now). With a new person starting last week we needed to setup a new machine and decided to install Vista on a free desktop. The OS couldn’t be activated because the registration was already in use (as a VM) and I didn’t feel like walking down the street to buy another copy. Thankfully, there appeared to be an option to purchase a new license online and activate the OS all right there from the newly setup machine. It has been a really lame experience, and I’d recommend anyone that might consider the option avoid it.

First, we had to provide our used license key. After several failed inputs with nothing useful in the validation error message, we figured out that both the case and the dashes mattered in the alphanumeric string. This is awfully stupid, they could have at least adjusted it in Javascript (writing key.replace(”-”,”").toLowerCase() is HARD).

Secondly, the interface was pretty rough and the site appeared to be running on a used toaster. Constant refreshing and retrying was required to get all page elements to load and all form posts to go through.

Finally, when the order is done, and you can’t undo it, you are told that a key will be sent in 2 business days. How in the world could it possibly take 2 business days to email a string of text? Dell can build and ship a 3U disk array in about the same time. It didn’t matter because at this point it was too late, I couldn’t undo the order, and I was about to leave for a weekend bachelor beach trip so I just didn’t care. This was on Thursday.

Monday rolls around, no key, so I send a message along the lines of:

I am curious as to the hold up on my order.

The order number is ABCXYZ4712 and the order was placed on the morning of last Thursday. When I login to check the status it says “Issue with Order” but does not tell me what the issue is or how to resolve it. I also was never sent any message letting me know there was an issue with the order.

Does it really take this long to purchase a string of alphanumeric characters?

An auto response arrives letting me know they will respond within 1 full business day. The next day, no sign of a key or a response to my email so I send another along the lines of:

It has been a business day and I have heard nothing. My order is still marked as “Issue with order” and still does not tell me what the issue is. I am beginning to believe no one is even on the other end of this process. Is a human reading these e-mails or taking these orders?

To restate what I sent about already, the order number is ABCXYZ4712. It is a vista license. There is nothing to ship, and I expected the order to take minutes. I placed the order on Thursday of last week and have not received or heard a thing.

I received another auto response letting me know it would be a full business day before they got back to me. As of now I haven’t received a key or a response to either e-mail.

Damn this is frustrating, I don’t even know how to cancel the order. That link just refers you to the same unmanned email account.

I’ll have to dispute the charge on the card tomorrow and be done with it. It is just disappointing that a potentially very helpful and clean process (being able to seamlessly purchase and use more activations when you run out) is such an utter disaster.