[Discuss] WANTED: used Win2K+ for a VM

[Darren Duncan]

Hello,

We haven't run Windows at home to date, but now we need to run a new 
Windows-only program, Quickbooks Premier.  The stated requirements 
for the current 2006 version are Win2K or XP (2007 should be out 
soon, but I don't know its requirements yet, and am assuming the 
same).  I just want to get the simplest and cheapest solution, so it 
seems that Win2K is the best bet here.

While it is conceivable that Wine will run this program, I can't 
assume that is the case now, and the Quickbooks user (not me) is not 
very technical and not a good person to be stuck with debugging it 
over Wine, so while we may use Wine later, for now we plan to use the 
Parallels VM and a copy of Windows, which is orders of magnitude more 
likely to just work.

Now, since Win2K is 7 years old and was superceded with WinXP 5 years 
ago, I'm assuming that there are a lot of unused Win2K install disks 
and licenses out there.  Though some XP may not be in use either.

I do not want to buy a new copy, since I prefer to reuse a license 
rather than sending more money to Microsoft.  (I also discovered that 
the cheapest new version is about $250 (XP Home, non-upgrade), which 
is way more than I want to pay.)

If any of you have an unused copy or Win2K+, or know of someone who 
does, please contact me ASAP so I can buy it.  Or alternately, let me 
know if you know how I should go about in general to find one.

Thank you in advance.

-- Darren Duncan