Now that many homes have multiple PCs – desktops, laptops, netbooks – it’s getting very expensive to try to upgrade a whole household. That’s where family discounts come in.
Anti-virus software companies were among the first to offer deals where you can buy the software once and legally use it on more than one (commonly up to 3) computer. That means the whole house could share the cost of one purchase.
More recently Microsoft has begun to offer a similar deal for their software, first with Windows 7 and now with Office 2010 Home and Student. You need to look for the packages labeled “Family Pack” to get the deal.
The benefit of this approach is obvious: upgrade 3 computers for the price of about 1 1/2. In the case of Windows 7, that meant paying just $150 for 3 computers instead of $120 apiece. That’s up to $210 in savings! In fact, since it costs only a little more than the price for just 1 computer, it’s still cheap to pay for a Family Pack even if you just have two machines.