I hated everything I heard about XP when it first came out, which is why I stubbornly stuck with Windows 2000. After hearing this from reader BB today, I’m sure glad I did. This is pure, corporatist evil – it cannot be considered capitalism as the free market depends on the free flow of information.
“I’ve been building & repairing systems for about 13 years & I’m going to start migrating my customers to Linux. I read an article about the new Windows coming out next year that specified new hardware would have to be purchased in order to run it. That was the extent of the info it provided about the issue. I figured it is probably some sort of copy protection/ snoop thing. Well, about 4 months ago I had a customer come to me with 2 new Dell PC’s they wanted wiped clean & windows 98 SE put on, they came with XP. I did my usual fdisk & format of drive but every time I tried to install Win 98 during the install process it would crash out to black.
This happened every time I tried & I used the latest drive management software to inspect the drives for hidden volumes, nothing. The original Win XP went right back in. I believe Dell has already incorporated this copy protection/snoop system into the motherboard.”