Its such a crappy deal I dont know why any one uses them.
I used them once and never went back.
CraigsList if far more worth my time and money.

I use mine for personal email, image and file hosting.
I have many non published web pages and portals that I share with friends.
Its more like a private and personal internet host for me.
Not the traditional "domain" thing to do.

With the costs involved in an Alienware system you would think that it would be been reported stolen immediately to Alienware.
I know I would have... and I have for some Dell laptops that where eventually recovered.
Is also very strange that Dell doesn't have a transfer of ownership program for one of their Premium products
but they do for their average systems.

Possible before the big bang fully crystallized the laws of nature.
And was possible before dark energy took over and expansion started.
Only possible today at subluminal speeds... at least that's what the brain slugs keep telling me.
We are going to need generation ships and the ability to live a lot longer.

Your are correct.
However I am not sure that there are not still situations where extremely high I/O is better served by hardware.
The lines are blurring much more now between virtual and purely hardware driven systems.
If you have worked with virtual machines as much as I have then you know this.

VM's are great sandbox's...
I will take a freely destructible and instantly restore-able virtual XP license anytime.
Thank you very much.

Instantly restore-able?
I have built a fully restore-able Virtual Machine network using a torrent based file sharing system.
The system was built for a computer school that uses terabytes of Microsoft VM's to teach the classes they offer.
They had a need to restore\reload\update hundreds of clean VM's every week, even daily.

This system uses every computer and network resources available at peak effectiveness.
It was free to implement with the exception of a high capacity filer.
A gigabyte network was not necessary.

The system was designed to "restore" all VM's accross hunderds of machines or a -single machine- very quickly by referencing clean copies of the all VM's on a separate hidden and locked hard drive located in all the machines on the network.
The Primary tracker, uTorrent, also references its only clean copy. (until an updated torrent \ VM image is made)

The system uses two components
1. uTorrent as both a client and server
2. a simple securely hosted web page to host the torrent files across all machines.

Restoring hundreds, adding or updating VM's is very easy.
(updating is as simple as creating a new torrent with the same name and sharing the new torrent out to all machines)
Restoring is as simple as logging in to each machine as the admin and launching uTorrent which does a CRC check and only downloads the changes made in the VM image file. (usually less than 20%)
Restoring or updating a 12GB VM to a clean state takes less than 15 minutes. (only re-downloading the broken or changed pieces)
Adding Virtual Machines across multiple machines reduces P2P copy\restore\update time and is 100% error free.

This took a job, that was prone to error becuase P2P file transfer is not 100% error free, that could take 4 hours down to about 20 minutes.
And it is 100% perfect because of the torrent systems built-in error correction...
Outside of Hardware failure every student gets a perfectly working set of VM's to work from every time and anytime... about 500GB worth.

A free pre-built and licensed WindowsXP_SP3 Virtual machine being included with Windows7 sounds good to me.
I wont be using their free VM to migrate my old XP OS, yet it will be a fun free toy to play with.
I will be restoring my current XP OS to a Virtual Machine running on a physical drive using Acronis Universal Restore.
Its easy enough to move almost any Windows OS from a VM to Hardware and Back again if needed using various software's like Acronis.
If its not a graphics driven or extremely high I/O machine VM's work work good.

A black hole would open up and swallow the universe, only to barf it all back out in Java and HTML.

I noticed I received a Troll for this and ouch! I completely see this now
- I was being sarcastic... sorry!
What I meant was, what a perfectly non-scientific 'word' or phrase.

Constant verification and review is always a good part of science.