Whokeys seems to be a decent recommended reseller. I'd never go 365 licence for what I use office for, my copy of 2013 is more than adequate. I have 365 at work and MS constantly moving stuff about and changing things does my head in. If putting 2013 on is a ballache I'll investigate the cheaper resellers but won;t rule out buinyg a full licence and keeping it for another 10 years.
I've got a couple of old slow laptops So may just ressurect one of those. I did experiment with putting Android /chrome as an op system on one but it;s problematic with CD drivers, the other has XP which seems to old for more recent anti ripping software so was my go to for problematic disks anyway. For £15 I can get a new external writer with built in card reader which may be the goto option. Ideally a case to but my internal reader in would be ideal but just not cost sensible. If I feel particularly adventurous I may dabble with linux on the older machine.
The beast has arrived. spent the last 2 hours removing crapware. I can get on here so it appears to be working.
I've actually managed to get an old PC working that I found in the storage bin area near where I live. Had a keyboard, mouse, big bulky monitor and tower. After spending a long time cleaning and dusting all the fans, removing all the crap and polishing it all up, I re-pasted the CPU booted it up and was shocked to find out it's actually Windows XP Home Edition from 2004. I don't care what anyone says. This desktop is peak Windows. Obviously cannot get online with it any more as the drivers are decades out of date, but it's good fun to browse the old girl and re-discover just why this Operating System was so beloved.
If you can grab an XP cd then the drivers for a network card of the period should be on it. Just had a root through my collection, got NT, 95, vista, 98 but no XP I'm afraid. The great thing about Windows is it's compatibility. On my new machine I've managed to get Office 2013 & Photoshop 6 working. PS 6 is 25 years old!!!
The only reason backward compatibility exists is because Microsoft do not gut the source code from the older OS's. There is a reason why the Windows folder is massive, plus it has a System32 folder (which holds all the DLL files from the x86 era). Pretty sure only Vista was hardcoded back into after they buggered up the original build and coded Vista Longhorn in .NET when it should have been C++), I can see a time when backwards compatibility will end, because eventually nobody wants to download an office suite with that annoying Clippy.
