Had a hard drive failure last week - long story short it forced me to reinstall Windows on the replacement drive. I'm sure some of you know how time consuming that can be, finding all your drivers, etc....Man, I hate to say it, but I shoulda stuck with a Mac...
Anyway...after a few driver issues, Windows kept getting caught in a restart loop. It took about 3 install attempts to finally get my sound and video card drivers installed on a stable Windows (odd I didn't have problems installing them when I bought them).

Lo and behold, Microsoft's stupid Genuine Advantage crap kicks in and decides my 6 month old computer (don't get me started on the Seagate drive dying on me already - thank god for warranty) is not the original computer that OS was installed on...warning messages and a big "you are a low life crook stealing from Microsoft" banner appear on the screen for all to see - I know motherboards can't be switched on OEM OS's, but hard drives? c'mon. I guess the anti-piracy crap in Vista is worse...Man I hope MS doesn't frick up HD-DVD for everyone!

After an hour or so of waiting on the phone, I finally got to talk to an MS techie guy who was a total a$$hole. He actually accused me of trying to pirate Windows on my machine at one point. After about 2 hours of troubleshooting on the phone, dude was convinced my XP copy was legit, so he stepped me through reactivating it...bye-bye intrusive anti-piracy banners.

That's it. I'm done with this crap. Linux all the way man. I've been using it a few months off and on now anyway. It works. Works better than Windows at some things. And nobody's accusing me of a being a thief.