If you're a U.S. college student, or at least having a working .edu email address, you don't have to pay $120 to upgrade Vista to Windows 7. You can get the Home Premium upgrade for just $30. Updates: See below.


Our blog sibling Gizmodo just noticed a Microsoft promotion at Win741.com, offering U.S. students Windows 7 Home Premium for just $30. That's a good deal better than the $120 retail price for an upgrade, and, as with the Ultimate Steal Office offering, Microsoft and cohorts aren't exactly going to ring up your alma mater's provost to ensure you're still enrolled there when you hand over your .edu mail address.


Hit the "Buy" link in the middle-left box on the viral-marke-tastic 741 site to sign for the $30 offering, a deal that's valid until Jan. 3.

Update: The information below was the original text of this post involving a $19 Windows 7 Professional offering. We emailed the Association for Computing Machinery and heard back from Lillian Israel, director of membership, who noted that Windows 7 purchases have been pulled from the ACM's discounted license offerings due to misuse of memberships.

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The CyberNet blog points any student with an interest or inclination toward the "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields" to check out the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), where a membership is $19 and one of membership's key perks is access to Microsoft's MSDN Academic Alliance catalog. That lets you snag Office and other normally high-priced products for very low prices, and Windows 7 Professional licenses for free, minus the cost of membership. A single validation key for Windows 7 Professional at the cost of a pizza is pretty good, but CyberNet sweetens the deal by noting that picking up eight separate keys for 32- and 64-bit version of Windows 7 in four different languages gives you eight keys that work on any installation.

741 [via Gizmodo]