I'm thinking of buying a real XP license.

Post #272,831 by static 11/10/06 1:17:09 AM Reply	I'm thinking of buying a real XP license. Yes, I'll take an aspirin when I get home and hope the swelling goes down... But seriously: I have an Athlon 1800 on a VIA chipset board that is due for a re-install. It's curently Windows 2000 (and always has been) and I was wondering if it was worth forking over the cash for an XP license, because it's AU$300 or so. Opinions of people who've seen and/or done that are solicited. I have Linux on several other boxes, but this one I kept Windows for my few games. (I never did get around to buying Doom 3, though I bought a Radeon 9200 just for the task about 2 years ago.) It also has SonicStage on it, as that is unfortunately Windows only. Wade. "Don't give up!"
Post #272,846 by Another Scott 11/10/06 8:58:34 AM Reply	GMTA. I'll be visiting my mom next week. The PC I gave her had Win98. She knows someone who was trying to be helpful by installing a pirated copy of WinXP on it a year or so ago. It's gotten messed up, somehow, and now doesn't work, so I'm going to try to fix it by installing a real copy of XP Home. I dread it because she doesn't have internet access (so I'm wondering how I'm going to activate it without sitting on the phone for hours with MS), and because it's a 900 MHz Athlon (IIRC), and because I know it'll just get messed up again a few days after I leave. Oh, and because I've never installed XP before. :-/ But such is life in PC Land. :-( I got [link\|http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16832116169\|XP Home OEM for about $90 from NewEgg]. It's a shame it's so expensive down under. Good luck. Cheers, Scott.
Post #272,865 by inthane-chan 11/10/06 3:14:26 PM Reply	Phone registration is actually pretty easy. I've had to go through the reactivation a couple of times for various reasons, and the line is actually automated, so you start entering data right away. Only if there is something wrong with the number do you get bounced to a human, and they've generally been pretty quick. Odoru aho ni miru aho! Onaji aho nara odoranya son son!
Post #272,899 by Ashton 11/10/06 8:39:00 PM Reply	Why not reinstall 98SE? As you saw in those links you posted ~ July: those who tried XP (for similar simple usage) then replaced with SE said - and they are unanimous in that - it FLIES. Ever count the default running/idling processes in either/both? (Others confirmed my SE 'sleeper-immunity'? bug-free experience, since the crackers have upgraded their targets -- even sans that Unofficial [link\|http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=38193\| SP-2] .. which does look intriguing though, for the picky (or paranoid.)) My grunt-net-machine just passed 5.3333333 years sans reload. Why.. would you want to inflict XP on self + [anyone you don't secretly despise?] Surely not.. one's Mother !? Unclear if my neighbor, after hundreds of hours of self-education, loads, reloads via pundits + experiment - has yet succeeded in making her XP-Pro survive on hi-speed. She's been focussing on *nix distros, last I heard -- remains somewhat in isolation for awhile. I gather that exposure to 63 BUG-fixpacks and 213 things to manually disable 639 ways {well, this week} can do that to a person of delicate sensibilities. Note that, in addition to all that useless corporate AD-related crap you have to disable: Pro has more Means for disabling, than the effete Home POS. The pundits regularly remark on this difference. That much I verified, loading both ... back when I thought I might actually try to use it on the laptop / on hi-speed somewhere. [Hah.. you can't even 'maintain' XP's daily addiction to fixes, sans hi-speed] So I have both Home and Pro available - neither destined for use by moi, except in a pinch. Maybe XP could work OK.. if connected to Nothing, like that NT 3.51? but for the unwashed: the fussiness of all procedures Still Sucks IMO - compared with the simplicity of SE. If you're doing trivial stuff, you don't need a turbo encabulator with DRM. But it's always Hard to explain to a newbie why the Popular flavor is 'sweet' - because that's the taste sensation of arsenic compounds. Luck! My [-]biased Beast bash + Hey! you already. knew. all this stuff, better than I.
Post #272,901 by Another Scott 11/10/06 9:02:43 PM Reply	Long story... I think she's got some USB peripherals that are problematic on Win98. And I don't think 98SE is still on the disk (it was preinstalled and I don't have the CD). But even if it were, she's among the masses that are convinced that anything less than XP is worthless. I've seriously thought about putting Ubuntu or MEPIS on it, but I know she's hate it even if it did everything she could possibly want. I'm going to take along TweakUI and a few more things to try to make the speed bearable, but I'm not optimistic that it'll make a difference as far as the speed goes. We'll see. Trouble is, no matter how I set it up, it's probably going to break shortly thereafter. Even before her stoke, she had a way of breaking PCs. If it gets bad enough with this one, Santa might bring her another machine a little early to save me spending too many hours on it. I just know that come January she's going to want Vista.... :-/ Thanks. :-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #272,855 by folkert 11/10/06 10:14:47 AM Reply	Buy a piece of hardware (small) and it qualifies for OEM editions. Here: Buy a power-splitter ($4 or so) and get WindowsXP Pro for $139 vs $299. Fun. -- [link\|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net\|greg], [link\|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry\|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ *i_wethey* Freedom is not FREE. Yeah, but 10s of Trillions of US Dollars? SELECT * FROM scog WHERE ethics > 0; 0 rows returned.
Post #273,050 by static 11/12/06 5:38:07 PM Reply	I thought of that. But I thought the OEM license was only valid with a hard drive or a motherboard. I don't need or want another of either one of those. Maybe it's time to go back to the computer markests... Wade. "Don't give up!"
Post #273,051 by Another Scott 11/12/06 5:43:52 PM Reply	Many places don't seem to care. I got an external DVD-RW for our Powerbook with the OEM copy of XP Home I purchased, but Newegg doesn't seem to require a hardware purchase with it. I bought an OEM copy of WPOffice on eBay a while back. They claimed they had to ship a splitter or some other nominal piece of hardware with it, but it wasn't in the package. Have a look around. You should be able to get a legitimate OEM copy pretty easily. Cheers, Scott.
Post #273,055 by Andrew Grygus 11/12/06 6:12:33 PM Reply	If I need a copy of XP OEM 'Right Now!' . . . . . I go over to PC Club and buy a Microsoft Mouse for $12 dollars and then they'll sell me the OEM XP along with it (and I'll sell the mouse to a client anyway). [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #272,876 by boxley 11/10/06 5:54:20 PM Reply	my laptop crawls now they put xp instead of win2k Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
Post #272,909 by tonytib 11/10/06 10:18:47 PM Reply	That's why I'm running W2K at home for 'doze
Post #272,973 by andread 11/11/06 10:12:27 PM Reply	upgrade or fresh install? Play I Some Music w/ Papa Andy Saturday 8 PM - 11 PM ET All Night Rewind 11 PM - 5 PM Reggae, African and Caribbean Music [link\|http://wxxe.org\|Tune In]
Post #272,990 by boxley 11/12/06 12:04:41 AM Reply	corp remote upgrade, thinking about putting sol10 on it Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
Post #273,099 by andread 11/12/06 11:00:37 PM Reply	upgrade is the problem Play I Some Music w/ Papa Andy Saturday 8 PM - 11 PM ET All Night Rewind 11 PM - 5 PM Reggae, African and Caribbean Music [link\|http://wxxe.org\|Tune In]
Post #272,919 by Silverlock 11/10/06 11:43:56 PM Reply	If your games run on 2K, DON'T SWITCH! Just borrowing trouble and a slower system (on the same hardware). ----------------------------------------- Draft Obama [link\|http://www.draftobama.org/\|now].

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