As flagged by Amazon, VIsta will cost new users in the US somewhere between US$199 for a basic no frills home edition up to US$399 for the full bells and whistles Vista Ultimate edition. In all, there are six editions of Vista, and according to reports from Microsoft, the home premium edition of Vista at US$239 will be the popular one with consumers.

Upgrades from Windows XP will be cheaper, ranging from US$100 to US$259. However, users buying new desktop and notebook computers with Vista pre-loaded will generally be paying the full cost of Vista as part of the retail price of the computer, a reseller told iTWire this week.

As also flagged by various sources last week, Microsoft plans to give consumers buying PCs prior to the release of Vista some form of rebate so they do not have to buy Vista at the full upgrade price when it is released. However, there are some concerns in the reseller community at the uncertainty of how this will work and the prospect of having to pay twice for a new Windows operating system may cause a slowdown in PC sales until Vista is released.

"We're not worried about business users. However, at least some consumers may decide to put off their purchase until the new year when Vista arrives," a reseller who did not wish to be named told iTWire.

Microsoft, which unleashed Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) late last week to millions of testers worldwide, is still maintaining its stance that the final market ready version of the operating system will be released to business users in November and consumers in Jauary 2007. However, a lot hinges on the reports from testers of Vista RC1.

So far Vista RC1 has received generally favourable reports but there have been some concerns about its high memory usage and the user annoyance factor of the new User Account Control (UAC) security system.

UAC has been put in place largely to keep users, who are not performing administrative tasks like installing and deleting software, safe from hack attacks. However, there have been complaints that the system is too intrusive and makes life difficult for users who want to do simple tasks like change the time on the system clock. {moscomment}