For those of us with a full cup of Windows Vista hate, the answer is to run to Windows 7. The release candidate (RC) is out and I too plan to overwrite Vista with this as soon as I can get my head above water. But this article from Lifehacker made me laugh this morning. What will happen when you get the Windows 7 RC and fail to upgrade to the paid version? At first (in March 2010) you’ll get a nag/pop up. I’d expect that. Then in June, you’d expect to be locked out, right. But no, even funnier. You can use it for 30 minutes. Then it auto-reboots – without warning. 🙂 Maybe it’s just me, but that’s funny and worse than a total lockout. Like what you see? Too ba(reboot).
It’s all fine. They don’t have to give you a nag-free year to begin with. If you don’t want to pay for your operating system, then get Ubuntu (or some other flavor of Linux).