I bought a new laptop a couple days ago, and have experienced the same thing Dave Winer writes about — everytime you reboot XP puts in a plug urging you to get a Passport ID. Plus MS uses language that might lead technically unsophisticated users to think they need a Passport ID in order to have some basic functionality. (This is something new, btw — this didn’t happen at all when I bought another XP-loaded laptop last Summer).
The other really annoying aspect of moving everyting over to the new laptop was having to call Uncle Bill’s tech support to beg for permission to install my copy of Office XP on the new laptop. In total it took about 15 minutes for me to accomplish this — I’d hate to think how much time I’d waste if all the 40-50 applications I use required me to spend 15 minutes just obtaining permission to use software I already paid quite a bit of money for.
And, frankly, I found it very insulting to have some stranger asking me to explain why I needed to install Office XP a second time. I assume that now until forever there will be a database at Microsoft which knows I bought a new laptop last week.