Interesting comments. Thanks!

My office laptops are all going to Win 7. I only have one left to do, but it's an XP machine. It's going to be a royal pain to reload all my software and rebuild my archives and workspace.

Going forward, I suspect Win 7 is going to be harder to get. New licenses haven't been offered for a while. There's still old stock out there. As noted, business class PCs still offer the downgrade/upgrade option (Lenovo does this fix right at the factory). Wonder if bidding on eBay will heat up for Win7 packages?

All of my older/personal machines are moving to Linux. I spent the last year playing with different distros. I keep coming back to Lubuntu, which is light and fast, does all the web-browser stuff I need, and has a robust and problem-free installer. I added Chromium as a browser and avast! antivirus for on-demand scanning.

BTW, there are going to be a lot of freebies out there for Linux users. People and companies are starting to discard perfectly good XP machines.