I'm DAZzled that your activating your system that way. Surely you can LOAD softwarE that would pResent the system as completely genuine.

I like the $40 student upgrade versions I bought.

It's strange what happens reading the article

Win7 activation methods that produce "genuine results" are exactly the same as Win Vista. Both are trivial.

I should mention you can do this reimaging without any additional charge. The Windows7 Pro OEM that came with the machine is the only incremental amount you give MS.

You don't need Software assurance. New PCs sold with Windows 7 Pro licenses (eg the laptops and workstations businesses buy) come with Downgrade rights to WindowsXP pro.

These businesses already have their XP Pro VL key and image, and are allowed to use it to reimage these new PCs to XP. You don't NEED a VL copy, you can use other versions, but activation becomes a PITA in a hurry.

It's quite surprising that unlike say MS Office, IE can't run different versions side-by-side. That causes people to use IE 6 for legacy apps, and Firefox for everything else.

My company (a rather large multinational) requires IE for a number of internal apps. Even the Intranet site won't render properly on Firefox. Yet the outward customer facing website refuses to even try and load on IE6.

Last year they actually officially released firefox (3.6) through internal software distribution channels, for general web browsing, and because new web apps (like new Oracle version) don't work on IE6. We also had problems when Firefox blocked Java. And of course days after sanctioning Firefox 3.6, firefox started running away with versions.

I'm actually quite surprised. For a very conservative company in the past year we've gone Office XP (2002) - Office 2010, IE 6 - Firefox 3.6, Lotus notes 6.5-8.5, Windows XP- Windows 7 is in trials and will start rolling out Q4 (and will migrate away from Novell Netware).

We'll still have PDP 11's, DecWriters, and VT220 terminals though.

It had to wait, however, for the mobile device revolution to have its day, being ideally suited to the limited resources on portable devices

WTF? New iOS devices are more powerful than NeXTStep and original OS X machines.

The reason it became popular is because the iPhone & iPad are very popular in the mobile space. They aren't popular because of Obj-C, but rather a combination of user experience and marketing. Not only that, but if you want to develop on iOS, you have the choice of... Obj-C.

On the Desktop computer side of things, "Visual studio" is probably the most popular development environment, in part because Windows is the most popular platform, but even then there's still a choice of lanuages: VB, C++, C#.

You can buy brand new 486 motherboards, and processors, with ISA and PCI slots
http://www.esapcsolutions.com/industrial-motherboards-motherboards-c-45_109.html

$200 netbook will probably do. Plus it has a built in UPS, good for 6 hours!