Well, it's not about what you think. Windows in your pocket (http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050909/index.html) is a massive step-by-step tutorial from Tom's Hardware explaining how to take a standard Windows XP and shrink it down to fit on your USB flash drive. You'll end up with a complete, bootable Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. I know what Linux fans might be thinking... "Knoppix does that" - but think about how cool it is to plug your USB drive in a random computer and generate blue screens everywhere.

I wonder how long it will take for MS to crack down on this.

After all, they spent lots of time and money (and lawyers) on telling everyone that the copy of Windows you got with your PC stays with that PC and can't be moved to another PC.

Vista will have a mechanism that requires internet connectivity for all PCs, and you get charged for each startup on a PC that's not the registered base hardware.

Okay, I just made that up. But what's sad is that such a rediculous notion is actually believable these days. There's a lot of power for content/software providers in how they control and allow use of their product, and it doesn't always make any sense for the customer or the public good in general. Yet, whenever any resistance comes or alternative legal structures are proposed, they cry that they are on the edge of poverty... "piracy, piracy!" If you give the customer an inch, they'll rob us blind and then no one will produce any content.

Okay, sorry about that rant. It's been a while since I railed against DRM and copyright law. I feel much better now. :)

Back on topic, I wouldn't be surprised in MS comes up with some sort of way to tie a license to a piece of hardware. But I'm not too worried.. they will tread lightly because the last thing they want to do is push everyone faster toward Linux.

Interestingly enough, the tool that is used in this tutorial to create a stripped version of Windows XP is similar to a tool offered by Microsoft (Windows PE (http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/sa/support/winpe.mspx)). Windows XP has built-in support to be booted from a read-only medium and that's what the BartPE tool is relying on. Interestingly, when in read-only boot mode, Windows automatically disables the activation check...

Back on topic, I wouldn't be surprised in MS comes up with some sort of way to tie a license to a piece of hardware. But I'm not too worried.. they will tread lightly because the last thing they want to do is push everyone faster toward Linux.

From what I've read about Vista they are doing a fine job of pushing people toward Linux already.

My question is... How well does this handle swapping hardware? I know normal Windows has a big problem with when you swap even just one piece of hardware, sometimes... So how would this handle being used on multiple computers?

I know Knoppix, etc. run just fine doing that (just a little hardware detection at startup and voila!), but I doubt Windows can handle it that well...