On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:32:33 -0400, Barry Watzman
It comes free with multipacks of the OEM version of Windows XP
(including the 3-copy multipacks). Small systembuilders therefore have
scads of them.
False.
Small builders may not use XP Pro at all, and even if they did, they
are likely to buy them one at a time. I build PCs as part of my
livelyhood (the rest is tshooting, data rec, malware clean-up etc.)
and for every 10 XP Home, I use 1 XP Pro.
I'm certainly not going to buy 3 XPro on the off-chance that maybe
I'll get MS WinPE with it.
It may also be available for download from the MS site, but only in
an area of the site restricted to members of various MS reseller programs.
MS has ambitions to make MS WinPE tomorrow's mOS, but this is crippled
by today's sphincteric licensing.
Two classes of being have legal access to MS WinPE:
- large corporate clients
- large OEMs
This is in keeping with WinPE's roots as purely a Pre-Inststallation
tool (PE = Pre-installation Environment). In reality, PE is to XP
what DOS is to Win9x, i.e. what launches the real OS, and what can
also run as an OS instead. Just as WinME artificially hid the DOS
phase that launched it, so NT hides the PE that precedes itself.
Now that we have hard drives that are too large (> 137G) to be managed
from DOS, and the NTFS that can't be read or written to from DOS, we
urgently NEED a mos (maintenance OS) replacement for DOS.
MS has been culpably lethargic in meeting this need, but may bestir
themselves with Vista. The trouble is, just as NT was a "network
client" dropped into consumerland as-is, so it is lilely that WinPE
will be dropped into the mOS role as-is.
If I were you, I'd forget MS WinPE until Vista, and Google( Bart PE )
instead. This builds a far more suckless mOS than MS WinPE, though
you do have to get you hands dirty if you want to make it all it can
be (by creating or finding plug-ins for the tools you wish to use).
In fact, I am following the above advice ;-)
hustedj wrote:
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Drugs are usually safe. Inject? (Y/n)
