Very true.
XP Retail is still selling for around £150 for home, and £250 for Pro in some places
I paid £280 for my licence for XP PRo a few years back, and found no benefits at all.
In fact, I am on a constant upgrade path with all my PCs and I have had hassles reactivating that edition, and I have a few "Sticker-lifted" licences that I have upgraded and resinatlled every 2 minutes and have never had any issues at all.
So, I have no intention of Ever owning retail edition of Windows again.
I personally feel, that the best version of any Windows I have, in regards to the licence and what can and cannot be done to it, must be with Vista Ultimate Upgrade.
The freedom you get with that, is beyond belief.
Because its an upgrade, I have total freedom to upgarde any of my PCs, whether they are 2K, XP Home, Pro, or 64, and whether they are OEM or RETAIL.
And, since its an upgrade, I can also freely downgrade back to the original Licence on that PC too ( Thats only right ) and I can then have total freedom, to move this Vista licence to any other PC. Since I have both 32 and 64 Bit discs, I can chose at any time to have either 32 or 64 bit editions on the PC, and guess what??? At any time, I can always go back to the previous version of Windows...
The benefits are great, and of course, this only means that I can have Vista installed on one PC at a time, but thats obvious but at least I have the added bonus that I can go back at any time to 2K/XP and that will free up the licence of Vista for use with another PC. You dont have that with other versions.
Oh, and for what its worth, you do not need to have another version of Windows to install an upgrade version of Vista.
I have worked out a couple of tricks.
1 - Part install Vista and then switch it off during the install. Go through the jnk again, and this time it sees an install of windows, but you can then go over it with a fresh install of Vista, and it will wipe the buggered install and start fresh.
2 - Just grab another HD with any version of Windows on it, and chuck it onto the Mobo, alongside your HD that Vista will be going onto, and it see the windows on the other HD and then proceeds to install Vista onto the normal HD
Funkily enough, grab a USB Flash drive and start chucking some files off another PCs C:\ and try that... It can often work even with a crappy pile of files, as it does not always seem to care whether its a good install, it just seems to look for a few files thats all... If they are there then thats fine as far as things go.
Sod it... Im waffling.
Dont bother waiting for the retail of anything to drop in price, because it just aint going to happen... hasnt dropped for anything so far, why would Vista be any different.