I'll admit I've never actually used 2000. XP came out only about six months after 2000, and my understanding was that XP and 2000 were pretty equivalent, except that 2k was never really targeted at home users. I've read a number of opinions that there was no point in switching to XP if you had 2k, but I've never read anything claiming that XP was worse (except perhaps initially, before drivers caught up, etc). But again, having not used 2k, I can't judge. Google turned up this comparison.
I used Win2K at work (the only year I had to use Windows at work, I'd always avoided it before and always have since then), and I saw the transition to XP and it seemed much more annoying, slower, and more buggy. Some of those things could've been fixed, but some were inherent in the design. And I thought the general impression was that 2000 was the high point of Windows.
May be, I didn't get into computers seriously until sometime around 2002 or 2003, at which point 2k wasn't readily available, so I've never had much contact with it. From what I've read, XP did a much better job than 2k of being able to run software written for 95/98, which was important for a lot of people. But, since you were paying attention to computers during that transition and I wasn't, I'll agree that you're probably right.
I use Linux as my primary operating system, I'm certainly not advocating for Windows here. I'll be doing work with Macs this summer, so I'll finally get a chance to see what I think of modern macs (I doubt I will ever like Apple's desktops or their marriage of hardware and software, but OSX has succeeded in doing what all the Linux distros have failed to - put a decent GUI on top of a *NIX kernel)
Hmm-I suppose I have to disagree with your rejection of Microsoft's power to not sell a product. Just because a book goes out of print doesn't mean that its copyright expired.
From a legal perspective, all three of the options you present would seem to violate copyright law. (Although I am NOT a licensed attorney, I am certainly not YOUR attorney, and I am NOT giving legal advice.) From a moral standpoint, though, all three don't seem particularly problematic to me, especially not #2 and #3.
Wouldn't buying xp either used or from a vendor who still has some copies in stock and is selling them even if they're not getting anymore be an option? I can't see why you'd have to buy it directly from Microsoft, and this is the approach one would normally take to acquire any physical product that is no longer being manufactured, or for that matter what one might do to get other old software, such as a game, that is no longer being sold by the publisher. At any rate, the "abandonware" issue has been around for a while, so I don't think this is a new question.
Did something happen to the xp that came with your laptop anyway? Or is this just a hypothetical question?
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From a legal perspective, all three of the options you present would seem to violate copyright law. (Although I am NOT a licensed attorney, I am certainly not YOUR attorney, and I am NOT giving legal advice.) From a moral standpoint, though, all three don't seem particularly problematic to me, especially not #2 and #3.
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Did something happen to the xp that came with your laptop anyway? Or is this just a hypothetical question?
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just hypothetical at the moment
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