Well – I’m almost at the end of my Vista pre-activation period.

At this point I get to decide whether I want to continue dual-booting with Apple’s Boot Camp and also access my Vista partition via a VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine.

If I want to keep on choosing to natively boot and virtually boot, I’ll have to pay for Vista twice.  Even though the same code is running on the same CPU.  And even though I can’t ever possibly use both of my licenses at the same time. 

I don’t think I can do it.  I don’t mind paying for value,  but I’m not a big fan of paying twice for the same thing.   The small amount of utility & flexibility that comes with being able to choose between a native or virtual boot process is obviously not worth the cost of an entire operating system all over again.  

Locked down, fenced in, held back.   Enthusiasm dampened, pocketbook closed more out of anger than thrift.  Do they have the right to ask for more money?  Sure.  And they can go right on asking.

I suppose that this cloud’s silver lining is that I won’t have to remember to hold down the option key every time I start my machine anymore…