XP home is $200?!

Hardware and technical stuff
1

That sounds a bit higher than I remember. If Newegg is charging $200 for XP home, does that mean every other site out there selling it for $100 is just some grey OEM/pirate copy?

sigh For $200 I might as well just buy a new EEE.

2

cozy up to a friend who works at microsoft and get it (i am not sure if they stopped selling it at the employee store in the past year, probably with the push to vista) for $30.

just get xp pro at newegg for system builders for around 130-140.

3
4

Ah, you pay $70 to make support calls to microsoft. Thanks!

5

others may argue and you may agree or disagree but i am comfortable morally in using an existing (spare) xp key on a slimmed-down version of xp meant for older pcs called winFLP (fundamentals for legacy pcs) that was acquired with questionable means via the bittorrent tubes of the interweb. getting a working bootable 2gb usb stick instead of a cdrom (since the eee has no cd drive without an external usb one) took a little doing but it was doable.

6

You can boot off a USB stick with WinPE you know. And it’s available, legally.

7

the questionable part of it was not the booting to usb but use of a different, slimmed down version of xp normally only available to enterprise but with a legit, unused key.

8

Technically I have about a dozen XP keys I’ve bought over the years. The problem is when I reinstall i’m not very meticulous about taping the COA thingy to the case.

I know I can run keyfinder and whatever, but I’m worried those either have trojans, and the unused XP keys sit in ancient, dead systems I’d have to resurrect.

I should have just bought volume license keys.

Edit: no, rei, what I mean is I have about 12 keys but 8 running PCs. I don’t know which key is which. If I run keyfindertrojan.exe I am corrupting my running XP systems. I am lazy and paranoid.

9

keys by themselves don’t have trojans. just build yourself a new slipstreamed xp install cd legitimately with nlite on a clean system and integrate sp2 or sp3 if you’d like if your original did not have sp2.

www.nliteos.com for nlite and http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder.html for keyfinder.

10

If you’re really paranoid, I’ve used the following code snippet (I forget where I got it from, but it works) to decode XP keys, you just have to substitute in the data from the registry key mentioned in the comment into the ‘binary’ array:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
        char key_chars[] = "BCDFGHJKMPQRTVWXY2346789";
        /* Starting at offset 0x34 of DigitalProductID under
         * HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
         */
        unsigned char binary[] =
                                        "\x11\x22\x33\x44"
                        "\x55\x66\x77\x88\x99\xAA\xBB\xCC"
                        "\xDD\xEE\xFF";
        unsigned char binary_key[15];
        char decoded_key[26];
        int i, j, a;

        decoded_key[25] = '\0';
        memcpy(binary_key, binary, 15);

        for(i = 24; i >= 0; i--) {
                a = 0;
                for(j = 14; j >= 0; j--) {
                        a = (a << 8) + binary_key[j];
                        binary_key[j] = a / 24;
                        a = a % 24;
                }
                decoded_key[i] = key_chars[a];
        }

        printf("%s
", decoded_key);
        return 0;
}
11

jelly keyfinder has been around a long time and is legit.