Too many cooks at the Linux broth has me unsure of third party drivers and support, waiting for integration for popular every-day hardware is a pain, so, with car keys and euros in hand just about to leave for the nearest PC outlet to buy XP I ask anyone, can I use my old product keys for XP(I have bought three notebooks with XP home installed)and can I just download XP from MS or do I need to buy?

The first person who suggests I DL a cracked XP gets a slap in the face

also, I've tried WinBuilder and nLite with no success as it just will not work with backup partitions like the ones on my notebooks.

TY~

Use the Windows 7 RC until it is out ?

You can preorder it for about £50 unless stocks of the offer are out.

Quite often when I have had to do a re-install for a customer who has a license but no disk (quite usual here where windoze comes pre-installed!) I download the correct version (check sticky label for version..OEM..Basic..Pro..etc) and then install using his legitimate key...100% acceptance/activation/success rate so far... so... download away..its the LICENSE you pay for..not the disk!!

Quote from Bean0 :

Use the Windows 7 RC until it is out ?

You can preorder it for about £50 unless stocks of the offer are out.

You are slow... related to James May pehaps?? RTM (build 7600) is already out!

Quote from Bladerunner :

You are slow... related to James May pehaps?? RTM (build 7400) is already out!

You'd be the one getting a slap for mentioning warez then :slap:

Quote from Bean0 :

You'd be the one getting a slap for mentioning warez then :slap:

Where did I mention warez?? I was just stating that the RTM has been released..have a peek at the MSDN site ...are you going to accuse them of pimping warez??

Quote from Bean0 :

Use the Windows 7 RC until it is out ?

You can preorder it for about £50 unless stocks of the offer are out.

...Have it burned to a disk already and could start using it but It's probably almost certain that the drivers that I have on the OEM CD's for my notebooks(two notebooks with wiped HDD's(don't ask why:shy)will not work with W7 or Vista, plus I'm used to working with XP and all the tools and apps I've collected over the years are designed for XP, sooo, I guess I'm probably just being a bit of an anorak - XP works for me, and I just don't have a whole lot of patience left for dealing with integration of a new OS not designed for the notebooks.

Thanks for the suggestion though

@ bladerunner - Where to download from then, I assumed it was the key I have paid for three times over already but where do I DL from the MS website somewhere???

E;

Yes, I ~could search for the 'correct' torrent, but chances are it's been tampered with etc. unless you have a legal legitimate link to a copy for me my dear friend?

AFAIK 7600 is still not the RTM.

You can pre-order Windoze 7 now?

£44.99 (not sure on Euros)

So if you like 7

Pre-order
Wait
???
PROFIT!

wow thats cheap especially looking at the release rrp, if i hadnt of only had Vista Ultimate for 6 months i'd probably be very tempted to buy that