| Like most people, I just avoid all that confusion and trouble by buying
| a pre-built PC from a major manufacturer. It comes with a licensed
| up to date OS, the hardware is all tested to run with the OS, it's
| supported, still allows reasonable configuration of adding drives,
| more memory, etc, it's available at competitive prices and frequently
| you can get other great deals, like MSFT Office starter for free, Norton
| for a year for free, full Office for $100, etc. Then I make a set of
| recovery DVD's. It even has the whole as shipped system image on the
| drive for recovery too. No fuss, no muss.

That certainly makes sense for most people. PCs
are cheap these days. This sub-thread was just
dealing with potential issues that people saving
a backup-disk or disk image might face if, for some
reason, they end up needing to install that to a
different PC. There can be both licensing and
hardware/software issues. Your recovery DVDs
may be useless except on the PC you bought. That's
not so bad if you only paid $300 for the computer,
but it's something to be aware of. A compilation
of hardware, combined with a software operating
system, is being sold as virtually a disposable one-
piece unit.