Converting from XP Home to Pro

Walked into a business today that wants a server.
I quickly discovered there were over 25 XP home boxes in house!

What is the cheapest route to convert to pro short of buying 25 retail copies?

 

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/howtoacquire.mspx

 

That's still the same price as if you didn't have XP to begin with.
(over 140 bucks for OEM or Value Lisensing)
the spread between home and pro OEM is less than 50.00

 

I expect that if you work with Microsoft and agree that you will buy a few thousand copies and will provide support so Microsoft doesn't have to, you can get somewhat of a price break.

You might check with some of the larger vendors like www.tigerdirect.com about the possibility of buying hard drives with XP-pro loaded. They might be able to get you something that would be as cheap or cheaper than just buying copies of the OS and the additional hardware might ease the guy's pain over the cost. But as far as I'm aware, he is going to have to pay some bucks to correct the original bad purchase decision.

 

We use XP Home as the server at the Church. Granted, the workload isn't as intensive as maybe this man's business is, but Home will act as a server, and is easy to configure for networking- just not as many options.

Johanna

 

I gather that he wants a domain setup rather than a peer network. Lots of advantages to that for a business but XP-home absolutely cannot play as part of a domain.

The lack of available security for XP-home would make me wary about using it for a business of any size too.

 

Funny thing is the way I got involved in this is because someone else built the client a "New Server" with XP home.

Guess what happens when more than 10 simutanious connections attempt to connect to an XP box in a peer to peer? IT DON'T WORK!