From: Adam 

Frank Haber wrote:

> I don't know why Cringely is trumpeting this now.  XP has been
> BIOS-locked on OEM copies from (almost) the very beginning.  That's not
> to say the practice isn't despicable.  I've heard a couple of
> unconfirmed stories that Dell is now using a finer granularity - a
> laptop's restore disk won't work on a desktop, for instance.  I'm
> checking this.


Ummm... my old lappie at my previous employer was a dell with XP & we
discovered on site that my XP couldn't be used with a colleagues lappie
even though the lappies were bought as a bunch & were all the same.

However mandrake + wine went straight on & Office worked fine....

Then again he (like me) used Moz/thunderbird as his mailer so no idea
wether outlook would have worked.

The fun thing was that it's still a mandrake laptop (chatted to him over
xmas) in part because of inertia (why break sommat wot works) & partly
because of all things.....there is a linux lib for those dell lappies which
allows one to manually control the fan speed & he really liked that (
they're called the i8k utils for anyone interested).



Adam

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