Some of you may remember my April Fools joke last year where I made up a phony press release where supposedly Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer announced they'd be offering Windows 95, 98, Windows ME and XP as free downloads on the Microsoft website. (My joke was posted here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2691958)  Well, this time it's no joke. You really can download a pre-activated version of Windows XP for free. I was very surprised to read about this. I subscribe to the Windows Secrets newsletter and it was mentioned in this weeks edition. It has to do with  running "Virtual Machines". Here's a snippet from the Windows Secrets website: "If you only need XP (or Vista) to run in a VM for a few weeks for testing purposes, Microsoft makes preactivated images of those operating systems available for free at its Download Center. Note, however, that this free version of XP expires on July 3, 2008. Microsoft has been giving away these short-term versions for some time, so it's possible that another downloadable version of XP will be available when the current one expires. If you ever reinstall the OS within your VM, unfortunately, you'll also have to reinstall any software you added to the VM." Check out the website at http://windowssecrets.com/comp/080327/

Yes but can you legally install them outside a VM, ie on a normal PC ?

Cause unfortunately most VM software is very sucky for 3D apps and games since it only emulates a basic VGA card and doesnt support directX or OpenGL etc.

You'd have to check the Microsoft website to see what they have to say about it.

Quote - Yes but can you legally install them outside a VM, ie on a normal PC ?

Cause unfortunately most VM software is very sucky for 3D apps and games since it only emulates a basic VGA card and doesnt support directX or OpenGL etc.

Technically, it's possible, but a little convoluted. You could download such an image, install it in a VM, make an image of that VM and restore the image on a physical machine. Be prepared for a lot of driver issues and mismatches, it'll take several hours to fix all the drivers.
There's a good chance however that the restored image has too many hardware differences from the original, requiring it to be activated again - which will most probably fail.

And no, I don't think it's legal. But I do not know for sure.