Personally, I upgraded to Win 7 (got it for free because I am a Computer Science Student and our school has a MS Academic Alliance which allows you to get a copy free of charge) and have been running it without any issues on my P4 3.0 GHZ machine (single core). Since I am working on honing my programming skills in school, I have decided to replace my Optiplex with a Precision dual core machine which I will pick up Tuesday next week or so (10.27.2009). I will see if it has any issues reactivating when I move the hard drive. I suspect my MS Office 2007 and Win 7 will both want to reactivate at that point.
My .02 cents on the USB discussion is that I believe that the standard is with us for quite a while -- it is currently being updated for version 3.0 and that will approach transfer speeds for storage devices that we can't even imagine right now. I kind of agree that thumb drives are better than zips, but I also really feel that if one is happy with their hardware and it does what they need it to do, why force them to get rid of it? "Dropping Support" does not necessarily mean "the end" of something. Heck, we of all people should know that being Amigans!
Anyhow, I have no love of Microsoft, and I have been a Macintosh user for years (actually needed to support both in my work) and I love my retro hobby as well... I am in a strange place there -- I love new technology and embrace it as an early adopter in most cases, at the same time, I respect and love to play with the older stuff.
