Today has been a hell of bad day, so I thought I would put this request out there for people to maybe feel bad for me and tell me OS secrets and such.

After much scrimping and such I just got a little Macbook Pro to replace my out-crapping old laptop (it's a TI-99/4A! Just thirty years newer!) and I enjoy it, but I really need a copy of Windows XP that I can put on it so I can run stats programs and Team Fortress 2 (those of you who were kind enough to friend me on Steam have never gotten to kill me because my desktop's video card couldn't handle some sort of speckling or something, blarg). I was supposed to get a copy for free from my job, but because of the economy and just generally being jerks that didn't work out, so I resigned myself to buying it. So I was on my way to buy this thing, hooray, except my car decided that driving on the highway was a really awesome time for the check engine light to try itself out and be all, "'Sup?" So, long story short, the money I was going to spend on this is going to buy a new catalytic converter (or, fuck me, a new transmission, why not), while I still do need a new copy of XP very much. (Piracy is apparently not much of an option on Macs, because Steve Jobs. No, I don't know why, something to do with BIOS or something.)

Does anyone know where I might get a legit copy of this for...well, less than $90? A friend of mine told me they were always very cheap when she was at Carnegie Mellon, but of course I am not at Carnegie Mellon, so I did not appreciate her help as much as I might have. I might qualify for a student discount, and I don't need the Pro version--Home will be fine so long as it has SP2 or higher on it. I'd go the eBay route, but if I'm going to do that I might as well click on those e-mails that want my penis to upgrade to V!st@.

If anybody can help me out, that would be keen. Thanks in advance!