XP install disks?

[ffutures]

The conclusion I think I've come to from the discussion in yesterday's thread is that while it would be nice to have a good Mac desktop, given my budget it may be more practical to try to get the better of the two PCs I have to run XP or Windows 7 (with dual boot to linux so I can continue to experiment with it), and continue using my existing software.

Of the two XP is undoubtedly the cheaper option, and the most likely to let my existing software work. It may not solve my problems with e.g. monitor rotation, but getting a PC that works reliably may be more important - I'm worried that the current machine will eventually die on me.

The better PC does have a Windows XP Home COA, unfortunately I had to erase the hard disk completely. It used a recovery partition rather than a full Windows install disk, and the whole machine including the recovery partition was badly infected with viruses.

Looking on eBay, there are lots of vendors selling allegedly unused XP OEM disks with COAs pulled from upgraded PCs, around the £25 mark - I assume that this means that a company somewhere had XP pre-installed on a lot of PCs, and kept the install disks without ever using them, then went over to Vista and removed the old COAs so that they could sell the CDs.

All of them have much the same statement, which is that what they're doing is legal because they're throwing in a piece of computer hardware (probably a screw or something) with each package, and that the disks can be used on any PC. Some of them seem to have many satisfied customers, so I assume it works.

Anyone have any experience of this?

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

I'd ask around the London crowd for someone who might have an XP disk and borrow theirs. You might also ask at school to see if anyone in the computer side of things can help you out.

You'll have to wake the machine up gradually after getting the OS installed, loading drivers as you go since the Packard Bell recovery partition which would have them isn't available. Best thing would be to identify the hardware first -- network hardware, video driver, sound card etc. and download their drivers before you start and blow them onto a CD so you have them to hand. XP is quite good at loading basic drivers for a lot of common hardware such as USB ports, Ethernet chipsets etc. so you might be lucky during the primary install.

I have an XP disk kicking around here if you want to give it a try -- it's actually for a Dell laptop. Let me know if you want me to post it to you, or if you're going to make Novacon I can hand it off to a trusted courier to get them to you that way.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

YHM

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

When I've tried it before, the Dell disks won't install onto older Dells, much less non-Dell machines. Won't install = a message saying it can't install because it isn't a Dell. Just FYI. All you'll lose is some time, but, OTOH, if nojay has gotten it to work before...

You can also get screwed with ex-OEM licenses. They'll install, but sometimes they won't accept updates, and if you've got a Windows OS, you really want to keep current with updates.

If you have a lot of virus issues, maybe you SHOULD get a Mac.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not me - the PC was my nephew's, he is not very good on security and has now gone Mac.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

I did what Nojay suggested for a Dell laptop earlier in the year. Rather than fork out upwards of US$50 for the driver disk I did a bit of research and managed to download everything I needed off the Dell site.

The laptop had a serial key for XP so that wasn't a problem either.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

There isn't really any very specialised hardware in the Windows box I want to use - graphics card is the main thing, I have the drivers for that. Apart from that it's a Packard Bell with Intel sound on the motherboard, can't see Windows install having many problems.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Microsoft's position is that an OEM licence is tied to a specific machine (which they define to mean motherboard). Whether that view has actually been upheld in a UK court, or whether the "sold with any hardware, even a screw" is a legal workaround, I have no idea.

But if you are buying it for a machine that you already have a Windows licence for (but no install disk), I would have thought your position was morally unassailable, and I'd be depressed to find it wasn't totally legal too.

I can't see any reason why it wouldn't technically work, assuming it's a generic Windows install CD, not a "tailor installation to our specific hardware" CD. But if they've got lots of satisfied customers, I'd assume it works too.

http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/licensing_faq.aspx#faq2
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YqE4R3-UTN0J:download.microsoft.com/download/4/e/3/4e3eace0-4c6d-4123-9d0c-c80436181742/oslicqa.doc+oem+microsoft+upgrade&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

[ggreig]

You may still choose to stick with XP, but there's one option you have that hasn't been mentioned. If you go for Windows 7 Professional (not Home Premium), you can download, free, Virtual PC and "XP Mode" - which is basically a virtual hard disk with a fully licensed install of Windows XP on it, that integrates into the Windows 7 install - so if you have old software that's not happy on Windows 7, you can install it into the XP image and run it directly from the Windows 7 start menu. It does take longer to start the program, becaus it's got to boot up a virtual machine first, but it works.

Depending on your hardware, your experience may not match this, but I installed Windows 7 on a laptop that shipped with XP about five years ago, and the performance was certainly no worse, possibly better, and I get the benefits of the latest version of the OS - apart from the transparent window frames and Media Center, both of which I can live without on that machine.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I really can't justify £100+ for this when I'm not 100% sure either PC will be OK with it. I think I have the XP thing more or less sorted anyway.

[ggreig]

Ah, okey dokey.

[ggreig]

If you had Virtual PC (or some other free virtual machine host such as VirtualBox, which seems to be very popular now) you could always run Linux in a virtual machine rather dual boot. Since I don't know your reasons for considering dual boot, I don't know whether this would be a good plan for you or not; the main drawback of going virtual would be that you need more memory to run two OSes at once. Dual boot requires you to allocate disk space to the other OS up front, while you can configure a virtual disk to auto-grow as it needs more space.