Microsoft do offer some very good deals when you consider educational subsidisation etc., and not just for schools per se. For students and teachers (as well as parents of students), MS offer the student license deal which has helped us purchase otherwise extremely costly software! For schools, when I worked at our local Tec College, the price per seat was around £50, and £1500 for the server(s) I'm pretty sure (but this came with some support). Someone (Vernon Levy) raised the spectre of lesson content, and said that it shouldn't matter too much whether we teach OS concepts or not, implying possibly that ICT only has a support element when connected with education (to enrich existing subjects through the use of ICT). This is why (I feel) ICT in this country is going down the pan! This is also not helped by the MS dominance in the educational market, since Windows isn't good for teaching OS concepts anyway. Applications such as word processing can be taught no matter the application used, and the underlying concepts are so important that knowing how to change fonts in, say, Word, isn't enough to do it in Application X or Y in another OS (though an extreme and useless example, I know ;-) OS concepts in particular are important for introducing budding hackers (not crackers) to computing power and application, and can lead to interest in other areas such as scientific applications of IT, programming, networking skills, development, and so on. Merely teaching Windows and Office will NOT IMO help bring up through the ranks enough skilled young people to make a difference in the UKs fast sinking skills base. The primary functions of operating systems is not necessarily to enrich the learning experience, though they certainly can do that, but instead to offer an interface between the user and the system resources to enable a more productive environment. This is what students need to learn- why an operating system works the way it does, when it does, what you can do with it, and how you can customise it to make it do things FOR you not only WITH you. Enough of that, I'll go back to learning real ICT ;-) Paul