For what it is worth, you might like to know that I have recently acquired a new (desktop) machine - well, not a new machine as I had some fairly useful newish bits in my old one, so I acquired a new case, motherboard, 2Gb of RAM, hard drive and dual core intel CPU. Bunged it all together, switched on and in a few moments, to my amasement, it filled the screen with a load of numbers and demanded a boot disc to be put in the CD ROM drive. I therefore inserted the recovery disc from my 8 year old virtually completely dismantled machine. Disc was read, and after much whirring and CPU activity, the screen announced the completion of the installation of XP pro. I was then reminded that validation was required - it's a freephone number, so I dialled same and entered the code on the screen. This was not accepted so I followed the instructions and the appropriate serial number was requested. I entered this off the case of my old machine, entered the new number generated and BINGO! this was accepted and the validation number issued. It is a slightly tedious automated system. Thus is IS possible to transfer XP to your new machine if the old one came with a recovery disc. Of course this version of XP hadn't even got SP 1 installed so it took quite a while and much downloading before it was jacked up to Service Pack 3 level but it is now working beautifully. Last week, daughter came around to show me her shiny new laptop, with it's 2 core duo intel processor running at I don't know how many GHz. Powered by Windows Vista the poor thing literally crawled! If it had been mine, I would have bought a serial number off ebaY and treated it to a dose of FORMAT C: and put in XP pro. To be quite honest, a lot of people are saying that Win 7 Beta is for enthusiasts (like many people here who are experts) but for the average Tom Dick or Harry, then it is best to wait until the final version is released. Only then will we hopefully no longer have to do all this dodging around to get a reasonable OS on a new machine.
P.P.