Well micro$oft pushed me to learn linux and they pushed me to use pirated copies of XP, I paid $200 for xp home full (not the upgrade) the day it was available, what a mistake that was. Their activation crap is worthless, I am not throwing away airtime on my phone to call them for an activation number every time I change a piece of hardware, it was utterly ridiculous, a tremendous waste of my time and money. Online activation never worked, the automated phone activation never worked so I was always forced to wait for some stupid ***** to come on the phone and treat me like I was a criminal because I couldn't get my (bought and paid for) copy of windows to activate. Oh, and where are the big price cuts? I thought activation was to curb piracy and then M$ can sell their software for much less $$, I thought Gates said it may get down to 40-50 bucks sometime in the near future? What a load of BS. Slowly but surely I learned linux, first I put it on my secondary computer in the basement, messed with it for a few months and then put it on my laptop with a dual boot of XP corp (the only way to use XP without trouble for me). Eventually linux made it to my main computer permanently, still running dual boot but for only a few games (CoD, U2XMP, Steam games etc). Once I am tired of these games microshaft will be gone from my home forever.