Interesting story. I run a corporate copy of XP so I don't have any issues at all with regards to hardware changes nor activation. I will take your word for how savy this person is, but if they were relying on XP alone to backup and safeguard their data they certainly weren't being prepared. Running Mac OS X one would also have to start from scratch. This part however I found a little extreme: The bottom line, is that there is no way to reliably back up your XP system, to guard against H/W failure. That's just false. Completely untrue. There are probably more than a dozen ways to back up your data as well as your entire boot partition, excluding tools built into XP. From imaging applications (that can be used with any version of Windows XP) to file-based backup solutions to redundant disk configurations. Hey, I've never seen a Windows system completely lost because of a simple program crash... But last month one of my friends had a kernel panic in Mac OS X (10.3, Panther) and discovered he had lost more than half of the boot partition after restarting. Just gone. Poof. Obviously the system wouldn't boot - he discovered the severity after booting with another drive and then looking at the first. In any case, I believe that no matter what OS you're running, there are tools available that can do the job properly, even if they don't come bundled with the OS itself. Bruno