IT Employment

There has been a lot of crying about activation codes. If you have to reinstall all you have to do is make a phone call and give the reason for reinstalling. The reason doesn't even have to be honest. They won't say no, "you can't". I have don'tit quite often, there is no begging.

If you are setting up a network you should always get in the habit of Ghosting your machines anyway to save you the trouble of reinstalling. This will also eliminate the problem of activation.

Depending on what stage you ghost your machines will depend on whether or not you need to activate them.

Generally though, the purpose of ghost is for rapid deployment. (I use ghost often) But I use it with sysprep so that the SID's are destroyed.

I can install all of my programs, sp's and hf's, run sysprep, shutdown and clone that drive, and I have a new OS with a new sid with every machine that was cloned from it.

The problem is, that if you clone an existing machine without sysprep, you get the same SID for the machine, even after changing the machine name.

In a corp enviroment, calling everytime I need to do an install is just not feesible. If I need to rapid deploy machines, calling is not an option.

While you still can't technically buy 2K licenses.

(This is assuming that you already have a 2K install disk)

You can buy XP licenses and use it to downgrade to 2K. This is what I now have to do on my netwk and with my clients. The license says that you can downgrade for a "period of reasonable use" (whatever the **** that means).

While it is true that you can't purchase Windows 2000 Professional under their open license (or other) agreements, you can indeed buy the individual boxed product. MicroWarehouse has a gazillion of them at around $280. But you can't buy the "upgrade", you have to buy the full version

And for the bargain seeker, ebay has listed a bunch of Windows 2000 – both full and upgrade (also some Server2000). And needing only 10 seats, that could be a viable option.

That can still be purchased thru open license as is. They have not forced the next generation of server since it is not even out for sale.

.Net framework is just being implemented in production networks (at least for us we are still in development phase, we don't plan to deploy it for another year)

.Net srvr will probably take about another 2 years until we see it appearing as wide spread as 2K.

The activation part blows...

Unless you know someone with a corporate disk. I think you could just use the corporate disk and then just buy the licenses through an online company. Then you won't have to deal with activation.

As for the otherparts of it though, you're at work to work. XP is only a fruity fluffy version of 2k. And it's networking components suck. They take the liberty of changing your settings for you. I know, it's a very thoughtful and handy feature. Until you're locked out of your files and XP doesn't want to let you back in to change their permissions even though you're the admin.

But that's just my experience:)

Mrafrohead

definitely...