Old lady lost windows xp

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:09 PM, John Heinen <hensandpat at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Thanks for your good advise, let me explain this, I need to do this
> right, right?
> She has window xp on it, someone reinstalled it, {not me), with a bigger
> drive 40 gb,  it still has to be validated with the numbers, she doesn't
> have them. She does have windows 98  cd with the numbers and would be
> very happy to use it. It was my suggestion to use win 98 and also a
> puppy linux edition  John

Dear John,

Win 98 is not older than the CD invention and can be installed from a
CD providing you have a valid key number that can usually be found on
the outer side of the CD envelope, no validation required.

If this lady has indeed a Win XP licence, and she is not just a
dangerous one eyed pirate, having only forgotten the exact place she
kept it, perhaps googgling "Belarc Advisor xp key" can help. But then
she would probably have to rely on a real dirty pirate, a true
criminal mind, lacking any kind of respect for the traditional
agreements on Copyright rules, etc. that would visit something like
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/11/05/ways-to-crack-and-disable-wga-validation-tool-and-wga-notifications-plus-download-and-install-bypassing-genuine-windows-validate-requirement/
to get some rather nasty tools to validate the install and run every
available update.

But then all she would get is an obsolete piece of junk prone to
viruses and malware, not considering the enormous amount of time
required to configure the damn thing to a usable state, restarting and
again an immense number of times.

To get something better perhaps you could take her to
http://technet.microsoft.com, for instance, were she could find a real
Windows 7 Enterprise Edition release valid for a 90 days test (after
which it will begin to behave erratically) (at least I can but I guess
you have to be a beta tester) although I doubt this lady has half the
hardware required.

Much, much better, you could zap her hd and introduce her to old,
stable, state of the art, grub1 wise and piracy free Ubuntu 9.04 and
live happily forever or at least till a better release turn them
apart.

Best Regards

L.

-- 
L M Nicolosi, Eng.
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