You said MS wants some bucks for an additional key.
Are you installing WinXP from a CD using a key already utilized in an activation?
Unix is great if your a geek that needs geeky programs written by geeks for geeeks to do geeky things. Are you a geek? Have you ever flashed your mobo BIOS? Have you ever flashed your video card BIOS? HAve you ever tweaked the mobo register settings?
Have you ever editted Windows OS registry beehive manually? Are you familiar with, or have ever used Wine? Have you ever gotten into the guts of an applications configuration files and tweaked them manually?
Does the issue of manual installation of device drivers scare you? Have you ever installed a device driver manually? Are you comfortable working at the command prompt level (basic DOS style text based interface using commands, parameters and flags).
How well versed are you respect to antivirus and firewall configuration?
If the answer to the foregoing is predominantly NO, then I’d recommend against Unix flavored OS in general.
Yes, Ubantu has a great leap in the Unix platform with regards to GUI. And for those who are willing to expend the heartbeats to learn, and hang out on the various tech forums dedicated to Unix-like OS’s gathering knowlege through osmosis, that may be the way to go. However, for somebody’s accumen with respect to IT in general and hardware in particular is minimal, I’d frown upon the idea.
Google WinXP Pro SP2 Student Edition on the internet. You should be able to get it for about $100. If you know a student, they can get it for free from MS Dream-bla-bla-bla (something or another) program. That would allow them to download an IDO image which needs to be burned to a CD. That disk effectively becomes a legit bonafide installation CD.
Before installing WinXP Pro SP2, make sure that you download the SP3 (complete) patch. Doing so will save you tons of time downloading the 100+ service patch/updates to WinXP Pro SP2.
Now I’m certain that I’m going to catch a whole lot of flak from my geek bretheren, but if you question them to the particulars, they’ll tell you that none of it scares them, they’ve had their box apart several times, and all the foregoing issues are moot points to them. This is because they have experience, apptitude, adaptability necessary to surmount the hurdles and unforseen gotchyas.
I previously mentioned Wine. Wine is an emulator that allows Windows applications to be “emulated”, i.e., run natively in Unix-like OS even so they’re MS Windows executables. WIll it work? Yes. Is it optimal? NO. Does inefficiency bother you? If it does, than can you handle the lack of functionality and/or feature set of native Unix-like platformed applications?
Dude, why don’t you just scrap everything, through the crap out the 35th story window, run over it all with a bus snd buy a Mac?
Macs are great I heard.
Heh...we all had to start somewhere! When I first tried linux, I didn't know anything about it (Mandrake 7.2).
:)
Like I said, I'll load Ubuntu and play around with it. It's not my primary machine.
I'm a student, and I get all sorts of free stuff from Microsoft's DreamSpark program, as well as through the IEEE Computer Society, but I have never heard of a student edition of Windows XP (though there is an academic retail box license you can buy), and I don't remember Microsoft giving away Windows XP client licenses, though I do get access to Server.