All those lowly P2-450 and P2-333 machines I reformatted and rebuilt for my IT department should have new homes by the end of the week. The e-mail response to the IT gurus’ offer was deafening. Until …
They made a second note of the fact that all of them come with NT, and to upgrade to Windows XP Home would cost about $99. The more determined in the pack don’t care, since they just plan to install their existing copy of XP over top of NT, licensing agreement be damned. The ones who shudder at the thought of scalping XP from another source might waver at the $99 price tag. Except …
You can’t upgrade NT to XP Home. According to Microsoft’s upgrade matrix, NT only upgrades to XP Pro. And the price tag on XP Pro isn’t $99. According to the ‘egg, it’s more like $185.
And a legal, non-upgrade full edition of XP Home? According to the ‘egg, it’s not going to save you a penny over an upgrade. In fact, it’s $5 more. So even starting over from scratch is hardly worthwhile on a dirty, busted up P2-333 you got at the office for free.
I’m so glad I’m off that crap and on to Ubuntu.
