Bob Bainbridge wrote to Charles Scaglione

BB> CS> You might think about upgrading W2K to XP Pro since the
BB> CS> multi-threading  aspect of XP is "reportedly"
better than W2K.
BB> CS> XP is a lot better at PNP  and ACPI than W2K but otherwise it's
BB> CS> just a prettier face.

BB>Not until Billy G. gives up the assinine Activation scheme. My system
BB>is in  an almost constant state of change and having to reactivate 
BB>it everytime I make too many hardware changes is out of hte 
BB>question for me. My thought are that I could buy a copy of 
BB>XP, uninstall it when a newer super OS is released, throw 
BB>it on the shelf and maybe a few years later decide to 
BB>install it on an old backup computer. I can just visualize 
BB>trying to activate it and being told by Microsoft that "I'm 
BB>sorry, but we don't support that old product any longer. 
BB>I've about had it with my favorite tax program TurboTax 
BB>also since their activation scheme installed C-Dilla on my 
BB>machine which runs as a service under Win2k, consuming 
BB>1.5mb of memory, even when Turbotax is not running. It also 
BB>writes data to the partition table area of hte hard drive.

I hear you.  Activation is at best an annoyance - at the worst, a royal 
pain for those who either lost their product key or do a lot of hardware 
swaps.  I rarely do much in the way of hardware changing so my 
activation of XP Home edition has not been repeated.

I agree with you re: Turbo Tax.  I returned my copy for a refund when I 
found out about C-Dilla and the screwed up activation scheme they came 
up with.  As a matter of fact I sent several E-Mails to their customer 
support.  I even posted a reply from them here in this forum. (you may 
have missed it)  I wound up doing my taxes this year with Tax Cut.  Not 
as good as TTAX (imo) but at least it didn't have to be activated.

You might want to have a close look at Symantec products in the future.  
They recently announced they were adding activation to Norton Anti-Virus 
and more than likely to Ghost, NU, and their other products.

Regards.

cscag{at}charter.net

CMPQwk 1.42 1262

--- Maximus/2 3.01