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There are two major reasons for buying an early operating system such as Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT4:
1. You have a computer that is not powerful enough to run Windows XP.
2. You want to take advantage of the excellent price of Windows XP Professional volume license at academic rates. But this is only available as an upgrade license so you need a low-cost operating system - and early operating systems are the cheapest.
Full operating systems are sold in two ways by Microsoft: as a retail product and as an OEM product. The cheapest option is the OEM product.
What is OEM?
OEM means Original Equipment Manufacture. OEM products are meant for the trade.
Although the OEM version does not have the attractive packaging you get with the retail box version (the one you buy in shops), it contains the same software. And it is cheaper.
To meet Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements on OEM operating systems, we can only sell this to end users with a qualifying product. Usually the qualifying product is a brand new PC. However, Microsoft allows us to sell all OEM operating systems that are earlier than Windows XP with another qualifying product, a computer mouse. Which is just as well as it keeps the price down. The mouse is included in the price.
There is another important point about an OEM license. The OEM software licensing agreement binds the software to the PC it is installed on. For example, if you want to sell Windows 95 software at a later date (and it is OEM software), you have to sell it with the PC that it is installed it on. Or if you had Office 2003 Professional OEM, you would have to sell that with the computer it is installed on.
This is generally not the case with the retail or volume licensing agreements. It just applies to OEM software, all OEM software. There is one exception in volume license agreements and that is Windows XP Professional upgrade licenses - those are tied to the computer they are installed on.
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