Chuck: What happens is around about once a day your machine sends a list of updates that it has installed to check it against the master list on the MS update server, if it does not match it will notify you of the ones that are missing. If you think this is a problem you can set it to manual updates. Jcleaver: I think the only hardware that XP is linked to is the harddrive so therefore most upgrades that people do won't affect them. All this information is curteously supplied by my husband ;)