Having bought my lovely new red laptop when I did, I am entitled to claim a free upgrade to Windows Vista. I’m unlikely to use Vista at work (because I’ve run Linux on my Thinkpad laptop since last summer) and at home I use Ubuntu. And on the odd occasion that I might have to use someone else’s Vista PC, it might be useful to at least know my way around. So I figured I may as well claim it. It’s free, afterall.

Hmm, someone’s changed the definition of ‘free’ then (and the ‘free as in beer’/ ‘free as in speech’ argument really doesn’t apply here).

To be fair, I was warned upfront that I might have to pay a shipping fee to receive my upgrade.

On the first page, it seemed to say I would be charge nearly £2 for the order I was placing. This must be the aforementioned shipping fee, I thought. So I continued.

When I’d entered all my details but, luckily, not my credit card details, the final total was updated to nearly £15!!!

If I have to pay nearly £2 for my ‘free’ Vista upgrade, they’re charging nearly £13 ‘shipping and handling’ fee. How much does it cost to package and send a single DVD?

So I closed my browser.

Didn’t really want it anyway.