Have I been done?
With the continuing criticism of Vista on this and many other boards, I am almost certainly going to build my next computer myself. Of course, despite a thread appearing here a while ago on recommended motherboards and suppliers, it has now disappeared as there are only the last three pages of posts available. Help would be appreciated in this direction, but no, I decided that the most urgent requirement would be a valid copy of XP professional. Plenty of these are available on a well known auction website, and despite there be no reference to Dell on the site I chose, when the fully sealed disc turned up complete with official serial number on authentic sticker, I noted that it was a Dell disc "only to be supplied with a new PC". Now the site (like all others) claimed with much emphasis that this disc would enable a fully authentic and updatable copy of XP pro to be installed on any new computer, but I remember reading somewhere that such discs search for something in the BIOS to confirm that it is being installed on a Dell Computer. It also occurrs to me that these discs may have been removed from new Dell computers which are now up and running so that the authentic serial number I have got is already in use.
Can anybody throw any light on this?
P.P.