Buying a new XP license

Z

zag

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Does anyone know where to buy a license for XP ?

For various reasons I just want to be done with Vista - it is a royal pain in the butt and is doing my head in at this stage, almost a year after I got it.

I re-partitioned my machine a while back and installed my old copy of XP from a retired machine, but when I went to activate it, Microsoft came back and told me I had activated it 3 (or some low number) of times and they wouldn't activate it again. They included a link on the message where you could buy another license, but the website it redirected to said you could no longer but the licenses.

At this stage I have wasted enough time and money trying to get Vista to do things that should be a doddle on any kind of half decent machine and I think I would be better off going back to XP . . . if only I could.

Does anyone have any ideas ? Ideally ones that don't involve buying a dodgy knock-off copy from ebay.

z
 
If you have purchased a licensed copy of Vista, does this licence not also include a licence for an earlier version of the OS i.e. XP?
 
No, not automatically. Only exception is some suppliers such as Dell and Toshiba offer machines where you can choose (once) to use XP or Vista. Microsoft desperately wants you to use Vista.
 
Thanks all. I may go with the suggestion from Dr M - all the other sites I had looked at were suggesting figures over €300 for the license, so that's not so bad. I am also considering the re-use option for any machine which I find dumped somewhere.

I know MS want everyone to go with Vista, but I think they have really, really, really made a big mistake with this product ere. The fact that my machine crawls along with 4g is really bugging me and I know I'm not the only one complaining. I saw a link in AAM for the Apple store and followed it to have a look at what was available - this is the first time I have considered a MAC and it is *only* because I am well and truly tired of not being able to do what I want to do with Vista.

z
 
If you phone the MS activation helpline (instead of activating by web) and spin them a good line, you might find that the agent has flexibility to allow extra activations for your original licence.
 
zag said:
Thanks all. I may go with the suggestion from Dr M - all the other sites I had looked at were suggesting figures over €300 for the license, so that's not so bad. I am also considering the re-use option for any machine which I find dumped somewhere.

I know MS want everyone to go with Vista, but I think they have really, really, really made a big mistake with this product ere. The fact that my machine crawls along with 4g is really bugging me and I know I'm not the only one complaining. I saw a link in AAM for the Apple store and followed it to have a look at what was available - this is the first time I have considered a MAC and it is *only* because I am well and truly tired of not being able to do what I want to do with Vista.

z
Click to expand...

I've gone back to XP for some machines. However you can speed up Vista by turning off features. Personally I turn off indexing, and system restore and stuff like that. If you turn off some of the visual fluff that also helps. Theres guides on the web how to speed up Vista. It runs ok for me on machines with 2GB of ram. SP1 helps with speeding some things up. Still not as fast as XP though, and it can't merge folders properly yet which is a big problem for me. I can see a Mac in my future aswell.
 
aircobra19 said:
Still not as fast as XP though, and it can't merge folders properly yet which is a big problem for me. I can see a Mac in my future aswell.
Click to expand...
It's constantly checking your files to see if you've any stolen media.....as demanded by the recording & motion picture moguls. Basically, in the future, your computer is not yours.Vista is a step in that direction.
 
Thanks for all the info.

That whole constant indexing thing is really annoying. I needed to copy a file from my desktop to another folder yesterday and I lost track of how long it took. I opened my desktop and copied the file, then navigated to the other folder. Vista correctly told me I didn't have the rights to the folder and told me to click here, which I did . . . then it proceeded to draw that green bar thing across the top of the screen very slowly and wouldn't let me get access to the folder to paste the file for at least 2 minutes. The destination folder wasn't even big or anything.

Grrrr.

z
 
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