Online, yes. Limited options? Well sort of. They only offer it on business class machines. I am posting this on my 3 month old Vostro 1500 running XP Pro.
I had every option you can think of added to this machine.
The really good news is when you buy a business class machine, you don’t get the metric buttload of crapware installed on the HD when you get the machine. I don’t have any free AOHELL for 6 months, or free Earthllink or any of that shit.
Windows XP Professional desktops at Newegg
I’ve been putting off upgrading to a new comp, but I’m thinking of getting an XP system quick while I still can.
I have no idea if I still have the disks, or if it came with them. I presume so, but my ex-husband was the one who set it all up, and it’s likely that if we did have disks, they ended up with him in the split.
Funny someone should mention Ubuntu, though. I have a friend who is a computer geek, and laughs at me for how much I get frustrated when a program forces me to use a mouse. He says that I’m correct when I swear that keeping to the keyboard is much faster. So when he visits later this year, he was planning to install Ubuntu for me, and give me a basic tutorial on how to get started. Maybe by the time I have to get a new machine, I’ll be great with Ubuntu.
I regularly have to call the friendly reps, as I reinstall XP a lot in recycling PCs. All I ever have to do is say that I’m reinstalling and this copy is installed on no other machine. I’ve never had XP ask for a re-authorization due to hardware changes.
I added 4 GB and a new DVD burner, and Vista snarled at me and wanted to be re-authorized.
If XP came with it, you cannot, by Microsoft’s End User License Agreement (EULA). (It’s physically possible, though.)
Ya know, I hear that a lot. Bloated, yes. Reorganized, renamed and hid everything, yes. Slow, though… not in my experience. Do you have enough RAM? I jut popped in another 4GB ($80 on special!) and it flies. 2GB just does not cut it.
Get someone to give you a copy of the disk of the same type, and use the CD key pasted on your case. Don’t know your CD key? Belarc Advisor (www.belarc.com) will extract some keys.
You will not like Vista. It forces more mouse use.
Make sure there are available drivers though. Someone bought a new PC at work that came with Vista. We are not currently allowed to use that so he was forced to install his older version of XP. The install went fine, but at least two components had no drivers available for XP and were therefore nonfunctional. They whole thing was a mess.
Understatement of the century. I don’t believe that Linux is ready for the home market yet.
Actually, I find the latest flavors of Ubuntu easier to use than Windows.
Yep, I’ve done it several times, too. It just takes a few minutes. Also, they don’t actually care that it’s not installed twice. I’m sure it’s in a database somewhere, but I’ve had the same copy of Windows installed on two machines for quite a while, now, and I haven’t heard a peep. I’m WGA and everything. (I have another copy, but I inadvertently used the same key twice). I presume that the alarm bells only really start going off if they find that, say, a few dozen computers get the same install.
I’m “only” at 2GB of RAM, but I rarely get over 50% utilization. The things that are slow are baseline stuff – starting up takes a long time (on a dual-core system, 32bit Vista Ultimate), opening Outlook takes up to a minute, things like that.
I suppose I could install more RAM, but the thought that 2 GB is insufficient sort of offends me. 
Me too.
has 512MB of RAM
Have you checked for spyware/adware? OL 2003 does start slowly… that’s Outlook. Your startup time is a function of the number of programs starting, your memory, your disk speed (SATA/PATA, disk speed, cache) and fragmentation.
2GB runs OK. It’s just that 6GB is noticeably faster.
(I just sat down to fix an XP system running 128MB PC133. Took fo-r-r-rev-v-v-er to load. Older couple from church, don’t want to spring for new DIMMS at $65 a pop, and I do not blame them.)
I didn’t see this thread before starting mine, but I am loving Ubuntu on my home computer.
Die, Vista, Die!
I truly loathe forced mouse use. I like my keyboard, it’s quick, easy and normally gets the fucking job done.
DEATH TO FORCED MOUSE USE!
And me
has 1 gig of RAM, and remembers the look on the face of the guy at his local parts store way back when 1 gig was an awful lot
HENCE THE ADJECTIVE -“BLOATED”
I’t hard for me to understand why MS does this to themselves. Why do they release crap like this. They clearly CAN get it right when they want to (XP was released to near universal raves). Any IT people want to venture a guess?
And this doesn’t strike you as being very, very wrong? Most games right now don’t require more than 2GB of RAM.
As I recall, XP was only lauded after SP2 came out.
My impressions are the Microsoft is dealing with an old, kludgy code base for backwards compatibility reasons and they’ve reached the limit of their ability to manage the whole mess.