and he is mightly pissed at Dell, too.

Turns out, there is new tablet coming along made for Linux.....this has cheered him up considerably.

..is the new Linux for mobile .. Ubuntu.com/phone ..

I'm drroling.

So MS keeps XP going so users won't move to Linux ....BWAHAHAHAAHAHAAH ...and then the fools make it worse with the latest tablet wannabe candy ass Winsux 8.

In prep I have bought a stash of Gigabyte pci agp motherboards and Nvidia video cards.

I went out and got a Mac. I could kick myself every time I use it, because I didn't get one sooner.
Yeah, Windows 7 is actually Vista warmed over, and "Windows 8" is actually version 6.2 (Vista warmed and rewarmed?)
Nope, my home PCs are not going Microsoft once this XP box dies. I don't think that will be for a while though. And unless Mickeysoft comes up with something better, I don't see going back.

The UEFI BIOS does everything it can to keep you from loading anything but 8 on the computer( I figured that out when my Win 8 disk would boot every time). I was able to boot from the internal DVD drive on one but I had to change 3 different settings so that it would do so. On the other two, the only way to boot from either a Linux or Windows 7 disk was to use an external DVD drive on USB.

... because people will want to mod the hardware, and will get sick of excuses about why they can't.

and use a VM. There are many out there. I use them, and they are quite good. I have many different OSes loaded on one machine, PC, Mac, and Linux, all on one machine. It's just great, because I support them all, and if one screws up, I can delete it, and start over.

Linux comes with a great VM system, qemu-kvm

I installed virtualbox 4.2.12 a few days ago but can't get it to work. I'd like to try some different distro's before I install one to take the place of ubuntu 10.04 that I'm using now. What I'd really like to do is install 12.04 with mate 1.6. I've had 12.04 and loaded mate 1.4 but its buggy so I'd like to try 12.04 with mate 1.6 before I install it permanent.