Yup, Ditto on the errors... I've pre-ordered in Germany, so I guess I'll be getting mine a week or so later than the rest of you :( Do I like M$, no, I'm a UNIX admin, (even when it was the last clean T-shirt I had, I couldn't bring myself to wear my "free" pre-order Xbox T-shirt) do I run XP, yes, on both my laptop and desktop, do I have licences for both, yes, did I register either, no. My desktop is running a "select" install from work, comes pre-registered, because companies rolling out 200-2000 seats aren't going to get on the phone for each one. My laptop is runing a hack, it permanantly thinks it's day one of my 30 day "trial" period. I may at some point convert the laptop to QNX, (which I also have a license for, though I have the "free" version too :) I needed XP for Poser, when my laptop was my main machine, now it's my 'net access box, virus checking everything, and burning to CD for transport is a good discipline. So my desktop will remain unwired. When I get home and retieve my QNX license from the '486 it's on (it's "node locked", you can only install it once.) then I'll make the choice, last time I tried to install Mandrake on my laptop, it all installed OK but refused to boot... Personally I don't think Linux will ever take over the desktop, it's just too hard to master, has too many options and asumes too much knowledge on the part of the user. In the server space it's killing UNIX, and colonising some space that M$ would like to own. But desktop? Nah, unless it looks like Redmond, feels like Redmond, and (most crucially) offers simple data interoperablity, (ever tried to edit a recent Word doc? Access database? Excell spreadsheet?)like Redmond, It simply isn't going to cut it with most "ordinary" people, Journalists and IT Pro's possibly, but "Joe Pleb?" Hardly. It's got a great browser in Mozilla 1.1 but does it work with bulk of sites designed to work with IE5/6? The web is client/server, so if you can't view a page, it's a client side, not a server side issue. I don't think CL are M$ (though they'd be dumb not to want to be) I also don't think that no matter how much we scream and shout, they'll change thier minds and give us unfettered access to the software we've just bought the right to use. I can't read the article kupa posts at the top of this page, but I read elswhere in this forum an analogy to cars, would you leave yours unlocked? Why not? etc. I think that's a bad analogy and here's why: the prevalence and availability of global P2P sharing networks. In essence, it's far easier and quicker to distribute a hack to defeat the protection system, (especially if the hack will fit on a floppy) than it is to hack & package the entire CD. It's far easier to get a legit CD, or a copy of a legit CD, install it, then apply the hack. Anyone who has grown up with computers, as I have, over the last 15 years, will be able to locate a hack for any given program in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Most teenagers I know of don't have DSL, but if you're only downloading <1.44Mb then dialup will do fine... I say teenagers, because that's the euphamish most often used, copy protection cuts down on "playground copying" which may have been true in my day, but we had to copy tapes, not CD's and we had no access to the internet. If you applied the reality of P2P to the car analogy you might come up with the following question: "knowing that anyone who wants to, can make a key to your car, why do you continue to leave it out in the street?" The flaw in the analogy is of course that of a finite resource, there is only one car. So how about this: "knowing that anyone who wants to can make a copy of your car without your knowledge, why do you continue to leave it out on the street?" CL have thier reasons for adding protection software, they may or may not be transparent to us. Most software companies don't speak to thier customers at all, certainly not in the informal way they do here. I find it hard to believe that if Adobe added a dongle to Photoshop tomorrow, that anything would change. It would still be widely pirated, dongle or no. I'll register my first install, after that I'll rely on the inevitable crack, of course "content paradise" may check and block you as M$ are thinking of doing to chipped Xbox's on Xbox Live! (as the supplemental EULA shows) but I imagine it will be available from the web too, and if that becomes an issue, I'll just use it from work... This is a non-issue, don't like it? Don't buy it, don't bitch about it. later jb