Remember this? It was the rather fabulous Windows 7 Family Pack, offering three licences in one friendly bundle. And how very sensible: if you wanted to upgrade a household’s worth of machines to take advantage of features such as Homegroup, then you could.

At launch it cost £150 inc VAT, offering a massive £90 saving compared to 3 x £80 inc VAT for a standard upgrade. Street prices went even lower, down to around £120 inc VAT. So you could upgrade all three machines in your house for a tasty £40 each.

Two weeks ago I received an email from one of our readers, Daniel Cramer. “We, like many other families in the UK, have more than one computer in our household running on a Windows operating system,” he wrote. “We have three, including a laptop. Two run on XP and one, for our sins, on Vista.

“Now seemed an opportune moment to upgrade the OS for all three, so I tried to buy a Windows 7 Premium upgrade family pack. However, this is nowhere to be found, despite Amazon and others still listing it. My local PC World knew it was once available but did not know why they were unable to get any more stock.

“As the cost of upgrading the OS of the three computers virtually equals the cost of a new computer, with an Intel i3 processor and Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS, I do not think I will be upgrading soon.”

A sentiment, I suspect, echoed up and down the country. So I sent a speculative email asking Microsoft if there was any chance the Family Pack could make a reappearance, and why it only made them available for a limited amount of time in the first place?

(Family Pack officially stopped being promoted at the tail-end of 2009, but stocks carried on being sold into the early part of this year.)

The answer arrived today:

“When launched in the UK, the Windows 7 Family Pack was only available while supplies lasted,” explained Leila Martine, director, Windows Consumer Microsoft UK. “We’ll continue to explore ways of bringing value to our customers through compelling offers.”

Which is all fine and dandy, but here we are a year after launch without any more compelling offers being made. Perhaps they’ll come with the release of Service Pack 1, but frankly I won’t be holding my breath.