On Wed, 19 Dec 2012 22:38:47 +0000, Stephen H
wrote:

Not so. My XP Pro I ran for years was an ex-Dell OEM disc which didn't
ever ask or give a stuff about the hardware.


you were lucky.....

No, it was common at that point, plenty of people did it.
Earlier Dell installations were a pig though, refusing to install
unless they saw a Dell flag in the BIOS or elsewhere. '98 and W2K
stand out in my memory for that.