Buying Win XP Pro questions.
Hawk
Fla Icrontian
I'm looking into buying the full win xp pro package. I'm building 4 pcs for my home network. I also build and maintain my inlaws pc-1, and my brothers pc-1, which they only use for basic pc stuff. Going online, card games, etc. the reason I want all to have win xp pro is that it's much easier to work on them, having the same OS that I'm running on my pcs and I don't have to remember win98, millenium, xp home setup, etc. I was reading the $300 win xp pro package at the store and it states that you can only put it on 1 machine! How do I leagally get it on the 6 pcs so I can update them, etc.? I'm surely not going to buy a separate copie for every pc! Tried looking at Windows XP site to figure it out and it's so confusing I can't get anything from it. Can anyone point me in the right direction for licensing and cost? And for those of you that frequent icrontic, please don't shoot me for the copy & paste of this thread. Hehe, I posted it there too.
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and yes you can leagally only install it on 1 machine per copy, although I have heard rumors that M$ won't hunt you down if you have more than 1 copy running in your house.
Legally, since you are building boxes, you can get OEMs one each for each new box, or each box you put significant hardware into. Motherboard plus CPU plus RAM is significant hardware, so is just a motherboard because generally you end up with a CPU changeout and new RAM to get the speed of RAM you need for the new motherboard. A HD and DVD or CD-Burner are significant hardware. A keyboard or mouse is not really significant hardware for an OEM buy, the way Microsoft defines it.
An end user building his\her own boxes can get OEM OSs from a system builder. For what you want to do, if you have a need for 6 instances and can justify the hardware as significant for all six machines it will end up on, buy two three-packs of OEM XP Pro, Service Pack 1a at least. You, as OEM, are responsible to check your config to make sure it is compatible with XP also. If this is your first time doing what in essence IS an OEM build, Check Microsft's Hardware Compatibility database to see if what you want to use is in there.
There is another way to go about this, but you haev to be very careful with what you buy as a set if you do this:
Get barebone computers plus one XP Pro CD for each of your 4 machines. Buying a barebones DOES meet the siginificant hardware requirements.
John-- Who is an OEM and Microsft Registered Partner also, though I do ONLY work and sell boxes and parts and software local to me and do not do lots of building OEM computers from scratch.
NOTE: I am also a VAR. I tend, if I want qty 1 of XP Pro, to buy from Newegg or ZipZoomFly, and if I need three-packs or 10-packs or 30 packs of OEM to buy strictly in channel as defined by Microsoft. BOTH ZipZoomFly and Newegg qualify as being down at lower tiers of the Microsoft channel system-- and both compete heavily with each other, so at any one moment either could have lower bundle pricing on what you want as far as hardware plus OEM XP Pro. I go strictly by price plus shipping and take into account how fast I NEED things here. ZipZoomFly tends to get things to me in 2-5 days from time order is placed, they default to in expensive shipping, and you can sometimes get things faster from them for a lesser price than you can from Newegg, once shipping is figured into the total cost.