I am thinking of buying an Microsoft XP Home disk on ebay. Has any one had any bad experiences here? I am a little spooked about it. Though I have bought and sold many automotive parts on there with pretty much no problems.
Also does a disk listed as an OEM XP Home work the same as the "Full System Package". I know I at least, need the "Full System" anyway.
I see there are lots of big numbered sellers on there that have good track records. And a few of them offer to make good if the product is D.O.A.
I wrote on here a while back about getting a computer for free that had XP Pro on it that was badly corrupted with spyware and such.
I was not ever able to get the XP Pro disk that was in it.
P.S. Is there any benefit to using XP Home over ME? I have heard stories of ME being bad. I have had it on my Gateway for 5 years and not so much a peep. I have been looking at the Windows ME software on there as well.
Thanks,
Check out this link
XP ProfessionalXP Home is lower down the page.
I use ME for four years until the hard drive gave up the ghost. It was running better than many other ME systems I have seen or heard of but only after disabling System Restore and relying on drive imaging instead. (Remember that '98 didn't have System Restore.)
ME was always low on resources and it can't use a lot of RAM, defrag ran slow with a 2 MB drive buffer and ran four times faster with an 8 MB drive buffer, so it depends on what you want to do really.
XP has more system resources, you don't have to re-boot to recover them, it can use 512 MB of RAM easily and many people use 1024 MB which is not so easy to do with ME and is unproductive anyway due to the basic lack of system resources which are part of ME's architecure.
All NT based systems have more system resources over '9x / ME systems.
64-Bit systems have even more system resources being able to use some 16 GB of RAM for real engineering and computing requirements.
Try XP on the XP computer you were given. Don't tweak, just make sure that it has enough RAM, 512 MB minimum, 1024 MB for really good performance, more only if your applications need it, and check out the system specifications. It would help if you could post them here so we can all have a look.
Processor speed, Bus speed, RAM type, drive speed, buffer size, drive size and so on. What kind of CD/DVD drives does it have?
Have you had a good look at Open Source software such as Open Office, Audacity, Real Alternative, Xine, Foxit and other good freeware programs?