Yes, you'll be able to use this. You can also go to eBay and pick up a good "unregistered" copy also. And they'll be offering us who do these custom builds the OS for quite a while to come.
This really isn't big news...they aren't extending the life of the product, they are only extending "support". Even considering this, it is only a 3 year extension on thier standard policy (33% longer) which has yet to actually apply to any product that was released after the policy was made (meaning XP is the first MS product that was created after the policies were actually put in place). The extention is also certainly understandable considering XP has a larger market share than any previous windows OS at the time that the next version was released. As for "how could this happen" and "how could anything become so bloated and unefficient"? It is largely due to 3 things. 1) Education in the field of CS sucks donkey balls. 2) Consumers are idiotic sheep 3) hardware has far exceded the needs of software for so long that it covered up the fact that #1 existed.
I've looked several times, but have never found any of those... at least not at decent price. No different than buying OEM copy from a retail source... You have any special insight here?
No insight. Just luck and persistence. I check eBay maybe six or seven times a week looking specifically for things like this. They are rare...but there!
I remember a few months back.. I'd found the best deal I'd ever seen on a T3400... I went, "Oooohh", and clicked to put it in my cart... Not fast enough... somebody had beat me to it by a few seconds.. bummer!
I tried buying a laptop from Dell this past weekend but they said the Vista OS is the only option; despite the Microsoft June 30 cutoff date, it seems Dell i susing an earlier cutoff date. Any ideas??
Which laptop line are you looking at? The Precision line still offers XP Pro installed with a Vista cd in the box if/when you decide to upgrade.