Accessories

XP Home Edition
Thank goodness someone still had this item. I bought it because I do not like Vista. My computer crashed and lost everything. Had to start over.
This was very easy to install and works like a charm. No problems at all. I would do it all over again in a minute if I had to.

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition FULL VERSION with SP2
I was ripped off, the product did not load correctly, after 9 tries and various help desk calls, I gave up!

Man, I hate Windows.
I only run this product out of necessity, and even then it's in VMware Fusion 2 on my Mac. Oh, yes, I used to have PCs, and I used Windows. 3.1, 95, 98, ME, XP... It's all the same. All MS seems to do is pile more code on top of older code, and patch it daily to make it stay together.

Bottom line: This is fine for getting some PC-only work done on your Mac, but don't put yourself through it if you can use a different OS like Linux or OS X. Windows is a serious pain in the butt. Everything is a struggle. It's not at all intuitive. While OS X does things like read and write .PDF files natively and plays DVDs without paying for a plug-in, Windows makes each little thing you want to do require extra software, extra drivers, extra licensing fees, and a lot of crossed fingers hoping that these components don't cancel each other out.

I'm hoping to try Vista some time. It may have had a bad launch, but at least Vista isn't a 13-year-old product that just has bugfixes and patches over it to modernize it. At the root, Windows XP is just the final version of the beta we called Windows 95.

Skroo'd my HDD, missing features XP had.
I used Vista Home for about 3 months on a new PC. Each piece of hardware I purchased for this PC mentioned it was 'vista compatible', so they're out of excuses for the complete failure to adequately 'operate' my 'system'.

At the near 3 month mark, I had a 'Blue screen of Death' while playing 'The Witcher' on Steam. After this BSOD, the hard drive was not only unable to boot, it froze my system before I was even able to enter CMOS. I had to unplug the drive to get to CMOS and change boot priority to CD-ROM. I booted to the vista CD and tried to format and reinstall. When selecting the Vista-Skroot drive in the installer, **THE INSTALLER BSOD'D!!**. Incredible. I've been building windows PCs since I was in my early teens, and I've never seen that before.

Vista BSODs were somewhat common in all games I played on this system... I'd have one perhaps once every other play session. I'd call it 1 BSOD per 5 hours of game play. This happened with an array of different games by different developers (Dawn of War, Rainbow six, Ghost Recon, Witcher, Team Fortress 2, several others). A subset of these games I had owned and played on XP, and I **DID NOT** have this frequent BSOD problem. Perhaps it was my particular choice of 'Vista Approved' Hardware... Not sure.

At this point I don't care. I recommend holding out on XP until Windows 7 (aka Blackcomb aka Vienna) is released.

I also want to mention that Vista Home is missing some features I enjoyed that XP. I have an linux fileserver with an NFS share. On Vista Home, I am deliberately prevented from mounting this share without upgrading to a more expensive version. I'm sure this is true for a handful of features.

Please avoid this buggy, over-hyped windows release.

It's Windows
It's XP. It was fairly easy to install but didn't format more than one sector. The screensaver works intermittently. That being said it runs much faster than Vista and makes a good little second computer OS.