"XP is designed for one OS and one PROGRAM per OS. EVERY PROGRAM must be registered to each machine, so ALL OF YOUR PROGRAMS must be purchased for each machine even of your machines are on a network. If you're a small company with a few machines, the software expense can be overwhelming. XP eliminates about 50% of the benefit of operating on a network... But I understand."

This is completely incorrect. I have absolutely no idea where a rumor like this gets started - but it isn't true at all.

Yes, windows XP does tie an OS registration to one machine at a time so you (gasp) can't pirate the OS like some people used to do but that's life in the big city - eventually you have to pay for something.

You CAN transfer the OS from one machine to another without problem, and there has yet to be a single instance of anyone "running out" of upgrade instances with a single copy of XP and hardware updates. Further, OEM versions of XP don't check hardware at all outside of brand... so no matter what you do with/to your Dell or whatever that XP will keep running.

"I agree with everyone who loves thier WinXP but I have two questions. If your CPU fan dies unexpetedly and your CPU fries can you replace it and boot WinXP back up? If you want to up grade your CPU will WinXP let you? I didn't like the ansers I've gotten on that so far. At work Win2KPro SP2 is rock solid and mine at home has been buggy(Maybe unlisted hardware incompatabilities) "

Yes, it will boot and run if you replace your CPU :) Windows XP doesn;t really care what CPU you run.

In short, it's like this. If you simultaneously change 3 MAJOR components of your XP it then updates it's registration keys with the MS systems to make sure you didn't "clone" it onto a new machine.

NO NUMBER OF CHANGES OR UPGRADES TO A SINGLE MACHINE WILL EVER DISABLE XP.

The problem WOULD come in if you had two identical machiens and pirated XP from oen to the other, upgrades that caused the systems to diverge would eventually cause one of them to become unregistered.

"I (thank the Lord) now have cable and when I turn the PC on, I am connected. And with XP running the show, so to speak, who knows what really goes across the line."

Easy... a lot of hacker types are checking every MS OS out there just DYING to find something incriminating or damaging being sent across the wire so they can sue MS again. They have the hardware and skills needed to watch the network.

No competitive advantage MS could possibly get from peeking at your "Quicken" file could ever compensate them for the potential damages that would result from exposure of snooping.

"As an example...I have never figured this one out: You get notification of critical updates, so you go to MS site to get the update and it says to you...this update is being done without taking any information from your PC (or words to that effect). Now, I ask you...how does it know what updates I need unless it "interrogates" my PC?"

It's called "ActiveX. Windows Update is a component that lives on YOUR machine. It gets a list of current updates from the server and matches them locally with your configuration. Your configuration is NOT sent to MS.

"XP is fine, provided you leave in "newbie" mode and change nothing. If you try to change to many things, it gets real unstable real fast. I'm using the Pro version, with the official guide "for admins" by MS press and still the damn thing died..."

I customize XP pretty heavily on our systems for different tasks, and have NEVER had a problem like this.

"Oh, and make sure you use NTFS for both boot and data partitions, and make sure your boot partition is at least 4Gb, don't ask me why, but XP eats drive space."

Go check the size of your "system restore" settings and your trash can.

"S He may like Linux and I will admit it's a more stable operating system but until they come up with my programs in a Linux version I will stick with Windows."

I have yet to see any evidence that Linux is generically more stable as an OS. I admin both on a daily basis and baring planned reboots for upgrades neither system should crash when properly set up (note that this isn't true for recent Linux kernels... they are getting LESS stable as time goes on).