Welcome, obviously

On this site you'll find everything you need to learn more about Microsoft Windoze licensing for PCs. You will find out how sucking a 60% profit margin out of our monopoly position is not enough for us and how we expect you to contribute more.

A licence for every software package installed

We call it a licence but it is in fact a contract. A licence just grants you extra freedoms do things that you would not otherwise be able to do. A contract means that we get to impose some terms on you. For example we get admin rights to install stuff on your computer but take no responsibility for any damage this may cause.

OEM or Full licence

We offer Dell and others huge discounts so long as they don't try too hard to offer competing operating systems on their hardware. As a result we just have to shaft you bigtime for a non OEM licence, you know it makes sense. If you want to be able to manage more than a few boxes on a network we will charge you an extra £80 to put back the domain logon code that we took out of XP home. Even if you don't need a domain logon we try to encourage retailers to sell you the pro version anyway. Note if you actually want to use any of the additional functionality of XP pro you may have to pay an extra £20 client licence to actually use it.

Volume Licensing

You purchased a load of new PC's and you intend to keep them for five years. After five Years you may refresh them and jump two versions of windoze in one go. As you know this is unacceptable. As a result we offer volume licensing. For a shed load of cash every three years you will get to upgrade your operating system. Each resource hungry upgrade will burden you with features you never knew you needed while slowing your existing hardware to a crawl. As a result you will need to buy more hardware with - you guessed it - new operating systems. Try our analysis tool today and find out why training costs are reduced by upgrading software as often as possible for no apparent reason.

The OEM Licence dies with the box

Pay lots or pay often. The choice is yours. Go OEM and trash your OS with every hardware upgrade, or go for the exquisitely painful "my balls in a vice" feeling of paying for the full version. Just to help you we will start reducing support cycles. Widows 2000 is almost 5 years old and as a result you will not be getting any of the stuff we belatedly issued for XP in service pack 2.

Refuse to eat the cactus

Once I have polished it a bit I will link the busness case that I used to replace our NT4 server with Linux here.