Vista Business 'N'

[Clocker]

Got my 2nd copy of Vista Business through the free upgrade program. I think I screwed up though as IIRC, I clicked on Vista Business "N". when I placed my order This version of Vista does NOT come with Media Player. Not sure if I should consider that an upgrade to regular Vista Business or not.

Why would they ship a version w/o Media Player?

 

[ddrueding]

This is the version for some Asian country that I can't remember. They refused to get WMP IIRC...

 

[Mercutio]

Wrong.

Microsoft lost an antitrust case brought by Realplayer in the EU Supreme Court. Removing Media Player was part of the consent decree to resolve the suit. As I understand it, just today they were found in contempt in the EU again.

I wish the US had actual consumer protection laws. It must be nice.

 

[ddrueding]

My bad. It was the "K" edition that I was thinking of, and it's for Korea.

 

[Sol]

The only downside is that MS deliberately (or accidentally, but not likely) break things so they won't work with the N editions. I found MS games particularly used to crash or not start up occasionally on XP N. Any in game videos or whatever still played fine and no non-MS apps/games showed any problems. It wasn't a problem very often (since I tend not to play MS games or use MS apps very often) but in the end the hard drive space taken up by an unused copy of WMP was less of a problem.