Originally Posted by
Error 601
Office 2000 had a kill switch for Product Activation and it was disabled in April of 2003. Presumably they can do the same with XP.
I've installed Office 2000 on several machines. There is no on-line activation; just enter the Product ID that came with the CD and off you go.
Originally Posted by
Ryan15037
I use Win8 for work and home. I know that upgrading a pc's is an annoying task so you might as well skip over 7 and just upgrade to 8 now.
As of now, Win7 is as far as I'm willing to go. The jury is still out on Win8, at least for the type of computer usage I do.
Originally Posted by
jwXplore
Editing your Hosts file is another _very_ good layer of security, but explaining that is outside the scope of this article.
My
hosts file went from 768 bytes to about 600K. A quick Google search will turn up several sites where complete files can be found for free.
Originally Posted by
alanh
If XP does what you want, go ahead. The main thing is don't use IE, as that won't get any security fixes. Firefox, Opera, and Chrome will still work and still get updates for the immediate future.
I use IE6, which comes with SP3, and immediately upgrade it to IE8, which is far as you can go with XP. That at least gets me to most sites. After that, Chrome seems to do the job fine. As you say, upgrades/fixes are more likely with Chrome.
Originally Posted by
alanh
I never had to re-install XP as much as earlier versions of Windows, but did have problems occasionally, almost always after installing a new program. If you aren't installing new software, this probably won't be a problem. The installation process in XP is still pretty fragile.
Hmmm. Never had a problem installing XP (and I've done a lot if installations). Most of them were pretty vanilla, though, so if you have to install things like RAID drivers, SCSI drivers, or other slightly-less-than-mainstream items, I can see where there might be problems.