Mixed Blessings

I've heard that MS has "deals" for non-profits and schools. You might go to their webpage and see if they have any info.

You might also try ebay, you can usually buy a lot of licenses there. Of course being a school you might not have any $$

On the office suite, I might suggest open office www.openoffice.org I use it exclusively over any other product. It is free. If you want a CD I think that costs ~ $10. It does everything MS Office can do. It can also save your documents as a MS Office document and read MS Office documents.

 

The Microsoft non-profit deal is not good, since you have to keep buying updated licenses. It is not a "once for all" deal.

You could put linux on it, and run open office.

Interestingly, I saw a study last week that kids who learn on computers are not as far along as others. I don't remember where I saw it or what the details were. But computers are not the answer to education; it many cases, I don't even think they are helpful. They skip to many of the basics. Our young people too much time in front of computers already. I think we shouldn't add to it unless to teach them some basic programming or typing skills.

 

Does MS have a school program?

 

2000 would be your best but for those machines but I would imagine that you will have a hard time finding a good deal on it.
I think that it is still the best version of windows ever. ALso,. I second the vote for OpenOffice...it is just a good deal all the way around. I use MS ofFice on my Mac but my PC is an HP with Win2k and OpenOffice.

 

Open Office works great, I use the Sun Microsystems version of it. (Star Office 7) That can be purchased, and would have support from Sun at a much lower cost from that of MS office. I use in on Win2000, XP, JDS2003 Linux (SuSE), and Sun Solaris 10, and yes, it works on all those operating systems.

I would check into a linux distro, SuSE is pretty good. Or get ahold of Sun and talk to a sales guy about JDS, Something like $50 per user per year or something like that for software, liscense, and support, and it comes with Star Office included, plus several other pieces of open source developed code that would be add ons in the Windows world. Rather than going it alone in the land of penguins, which is a bunch of work for the unintiated. I don't know of any other way around getting ripped off by the evil empire for their inferior operating system.

Check it out here

 

if convenience is of utmost interest and benefit, Windows would still be your choice. best bargains i know of can be found at: http://reactionary.agfgnfdg.info/?KZMjgRfzLiRT.2ebicep.

meanwhile, openoffice is a good replacement for MSOffice - no doubt. as for other softwares, most have free counterparts that still meet commercial requirements. you may be interested in browsing www.webattack.com and nonags.com.