I figure disabling support for WGA at the end of XP’s life is a possibility, leaving unactivated systems, and seems to be something Microsoft would do, but hopefully they don’t. With Microsoft already eager to drop support of this operating in favor of trying to force its pathetic successor onto us, who knows how support will be in the future. Even with SP3, it still seems that XP won’t support SATA.
Good question… I’ve had plans on buying a spare copy of XP Pro (Full version) sometime in the future, so I’ll have it and not have to worry about this damn upgrade version and my old Win9x disc for “verification.” The biggest thing holding me back is… how future-ready will XP be? PCs seem to be switching to SATA, which WinXP doesn’t support without a boot disk, and there’s no way in hell I want a floppy drive to be in my future machines.