A week or so ago, I was telling you about my frustration with license keys, and how difficult they were to keep track of. The Microsoft licensing system has gotten so complex, I must own 8 or 9 licenses for Windows but only have 3 computers.

So I finally was able to install Windows XP on my second machine (soon to be my primary PC). I installed Windows Media Center. Now I wasn't planning on having a "media center" and if it wasn't for the fact that the only license key that I could find with a matching CD was Media Center, then I wouldn't have. But I did. And I like it.

It connects to my XBox 360 nicely. Although I can't play DIVX movies on there, I guess if I really wanted to watch a movie on my XBox over the network, I could reencode it to uncompressed AVI... Or I can watch it straight off the PC fine.

But in the end, I did NOT have to purchase an extra license. Did you know Microsoft is asking for $400 for a copy of XP Professional that is not an upgrade edition. Holy smokes! If it was $150, I would have probably ended up buying another copy. But $400 is basically what I am sending to World Vision on a yearly basis. It's a lot of money for some software who's development costs have LONG LONG since been paid for. Microsoft makes $1 Billion per month (or something like that) off of Windows alone. I don't need to be part of that.

Anyways, things are now good here. No other reason not to completely switch to the new machine... We'll see how long that takes.