Hey I was if this was a real deal. Full version?? Any catches?

works perfectly

Is sp1 integrated into it?

i dont know what that means... but i got the XP Pro version and upgraded from home and formated comp and reinstalled it to full just fine as well

llama boy, stop posting constantly when you know nothing. the book store has the academic version. it's the full pro. I never bought one so i cant tell you if sp1 is on it, however, they may have the new sp2 winxp cds out. You have to be a umr student /faculty to legaly use it, but microsoft would never really know otherwise. depending on your major you should go check out msdnaa where you can get the winxp sp2 cd like i did. talk with one of your proffesors about it, that way it would be between 0 and 12 dollars. I can't tell you the site because its diffrent for every major. hope that helps.

Yeah, if you're a EE or CompE, it's like $10 to have the CD mailed to you. Very nice.

he asked "does it work" i said yes, id say on that aspect i know pretty dman well what im talking about

cool cool. I'm going to talk to one of my professors about the msdn thingy. Hopefully they offer it through the M.E. department. Another question...
Whats the difference between the retail version and the academic version?

Only difference is that the academic version is only sold to students and teachers and is usually only an upgrade. Other than that, it is exactly the same.

Upgrade?? Meaning I have to have a version of window's already in my possesion?? that sucks. Right now I have a pirated version that I'm going to ditch and purchase a legal one, but if all these versions through umr are academic versions (upgrades), it looks like I'm stuck without forking out some serious cash for a full retail version. Right?

i reformated my computer and did a regular install from the CD i got at the bookstore

Did you format with the winxp cd, or with something else and then install winxp? Because if you reformat with the cd, it still sees a previous version of windows there, so it classifies as an upgrade even though you are installing a clean copy. And if it is only an upgrade version you can still use it because it will recognize the pirated version as "legal". Which you can upgrade from.

yeah, i used the cd to format, but when i first put it in it had an option to install windows as well, with a not reccommended next to it, i didnt wanna lose everyhting at that point so i upgraded, i assume it would install becaus eit had the option and i odnt recall it being greyed out

The catch is that you can't resell your copy to anyone else and you might not be able to use it for commercial purposes ( not sure about the latter ). I would suggest saving your 67$ and using linux instead.

Llama, you are doing something different than what he is doing. You UPGRADED, he wants to REFORMAT and use a clean copy. If you REFORMATED you would have lost all the data on that drive.

You can resell your copy, kinda pointless though. Since you have to register each copy with Microsoft and they only allow you to register one computer for one copy. And linux doesn't have enough software to meet my (and most others) needs. When they come out with a decent emulator so I can run my windows programs on it, then maybe. But until then I can config my winxp to run just as fast if I were running linux.