Yes it's what you get when you buy it in most high street stores, which where I got mine for £9.99 a couple of years ago, never hurts to have a disk copy. Anyway having installed it it's exactly the same as N3V's other than the Branding and the start menu entry which reflects the different name. And no it does not require the disk to be in the drive and patches up to 61388 before the "Experts" chip in ;o)