Just my $0.02
You can get the major MS software products for $5 at several schools even outside of texas. The same deal is also available at Purdue (my school), IU and GA tech. I have the whole suite including office 2000, windows 2000, the whole MS dev studio and MSDN and will also go out to get the office XP and win XP soon for $5 each. There isa gotcha however. Basically, most of the OS's are the upgrade versions not complete installations. There is a separate CD key for each (unlike one massive CD key for the whole school). However, the license agreement says that you can only get one installation and when you graduate from school, you have to return or destroy your software obtained from school.
Soil---