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Operating System Installation Discs


Iain

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Hi everyone

I'm about to start a networking course and have access to some old PCs. I'd like to get some old OS installation discs so I can play around with 98, ME, 2000 and XP interconnectivity. I have seen several vendors on eBay but I am apprehensive regarding the authenticity of the CDs that they sell.

I have called a few local retailers and they can't help me with anything other than XP. What does anyone think? Are there any reliable sources of older OS installation discs? Has anyone else faced this dilemma? I really think that playing around with some live systems will help more than reading books about what parameters need to be set in the various systems.

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You could try calling microsoft, or a cheap 2nd hand computer store (the places that sell p2's etc for £50 or so). 2K shouldn't be that hard to get hold of either.

But in all honesty, I know there still copyrighted but if your doing it to learn i say pirate away, the lessons learned outway the moral issues in my mind.

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Have you thought about using Linux? You can get older distros around so you can test things of different ages if you want. I personally don't think it would be worth looking at anything past 2000 anyway.

2000 can be got easily if you look at the online retailers but it still comes at a price because a large number of compaines never upgraded to XP so Microsoft never lowered the price because of less of a demand.

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Yeah, 'fraid I've got to agree with VaKo here...

For educational purposes (or just screwing around with OSs) you not only don't want to look too hard for them, but you don't want to over-pay...

Besides this, it's very hard to get original copies of old MS OSs anyhow...

Also consider that it would be morally preferrable to steal than to pay for someone to steal, right? So, by that logic most of the copies on eBay are moral hotbeds :D

All this combined, I say hell, pirate it... I mean MS aren't exactly gonna extract any more money from the older OSs anyhow and they don't even support some of them. Go to it man!

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This might sound wierd... But check out the charity shops.

I found a 4 port KVM for £8 in a charity shop the other month. And they had a boxed copy of windows 98 for £4 in a different charity shop across the road.

Also: sign up for freeclycle in your area if there is one... (google for it).

There are usually a ton of generous people on there that might be able to help you out :)

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If there's a university near you, you might want to check there. The two major universities near me (Michigan State and the University of Michigan) both have property deptartments, where they sell off old University property for cheap. A buddy of mine got an old HP laserjet printer for $45

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It's not just pre-2K. They all suck. Yesterday we were trying for 3 full hours to install a plugin on IIS (proxy plugin to route requests through). We were used to UNIX boxen for this, but they wanted us to use Server 2003 for some reason. Couldn't find what it was that was preventing the DLL from loading. Today we heard back from the guy who made the DLL that on some never-before used tab in the configuration of IIS there was a checkbox that needed to be unchecked...

Fuckers.

If you want all of Microsoft's OSes, you could get an MSDN license. Yes, they cost, but you get everything (and I truly mean _EVERYTHING_) legit.

Alternatively, isn't there a torrent somewhere that simply houses all MS OSes? I know I've seen something like that before. Went as far back as old DOS versions.

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See thats the thing, the most complicated setup i've every built was for 6 computers, so for me XP/2003 has a decent easy to use networking system that seems pretty idiot proof. Even managed to build a dasiy chained system that shared the internet between firewire, cat5, wifi and bluetooth, and its never crapped out on me.

Thinking about it, I really need to start learning how to do it properly, with *nix.

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Have you thought about using Linux? You can get older distros around so you can test things of different ages if you want. I personally don't think it would be worth looking at anything past 2000 anyway.

2000 can be got easily if you look at the online retailers but it still comes at a price because a large number of compaines never upgraded to XP so Microsoft never lowered the price because of less of a demand.

Ten to one says the class he is going through is the msce certification.

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