On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Bill Stewart wrote:
The El Cheapo PCs each came with a licensed Win98; I've got the disks in a stack, and keeping track of which CD goes with which PC would be a serious annoyance. It's actually worse, because the PCs are pieces of junk that need to be have major chunks of Windows reloaded every once in a while, though at least Win98 has less of the "you have moved your mouse, please put in the Windows CD and reboot" that Win95 had. It's annoying enough to keep track of which Win98 serial numbers go with which CDROMs - writing the number on the CDROM helps, but you can't read it when it's in the drive :-)
Whenever I install a copy of Windows (rare these days), I always copy the install files to the hard drive. The reason for this is that half the time when Windows decides it needs something else, it cannot find the CD-ROM drive. This new policy guarantees that I will never buy a Microsoft OS again. I actually upgrade the motherboards on home machines. I cannot afford to repurchace, replace and reinstall every piece of software on those machines just to upgrade the hardware. Fuck them! Not for a game machine. (Which is about all that Windows gets used for around here. That and Eudora.) This is going to make life HELL for every sysadmin who has to deal with this crap. I expect that you will see alot of admins printing the serial numbers and taping them to the machines. Microsoft is just trying to squeeze every last dollar from their customers. Many of them are going to get tired of it and tell them where to go. alan@ctrl-alt-del.com | Note to AOL users: for a quick shortcut to reply Alan Olsen | to my mail, just hit the ctrl, alt and del keys. "In the future, everything will have its 15 minutes of blame."