Perhaps you are thinking of the Windows 7 "family pack" which let you upgrade three PCs for $149.99.

There are also various OEM 3-packs.

They even tried to somehow have it so that selling computers without windows would be illegal. Their reasoning went something like this:

• A computer needs an OS to function

• The only 'real' OS for the PC platform is Windows

• A user who buys a PC without buying Windows still needs an OS

• Hence, the user will use an illegal copy of windows

And in fact, seeing how hard it is to buy a complete consumer PC system without paying for the windows licence (as in, pick the system you really want, and see if you can get it any cheaper by demanding it without any OS installed), they practically succeeded.

They are now. After MS was fined for anti-competitive practices.

And I don't see anyone doing it. Smells like a money-pit product to me.

Yeah, and recently I read the news that MS wants to compete against the Ipad now even though they're market isn't even related to Apples anymore and instead they compete more against adobe and oracle.

EDIT: and google.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I bought this computer with no software at all — and bought Windows from somewhere else. It's not hard to buy a computer without an OS.

If you were to buy Windows, I'd recommend that you don't buy Ultimate for that reason. It's highly unlikely that you'd ever need to use XP mode, especially if you don't already have software that is XP exclusive. If it turns out that you do need XP mode or some other feature, then you can get the features you need using "Anytime Upgrade", so you don't need to buy the expensive version 'just in case'.

Probably isn't running an OS based on my suggestion.

XP no longer carries my blessing. Upward and onward!

I still run windows vista on a laptop and windows ME on an old 64meg RAM HP that I keep around because it is the only box with a 9-pin serial port that I need to use as a serial terminal.

Also Having a 9x version of windows on that old box which now has a s3 virge dx in it allows me to test that things still run on a low spec box.

Or perhaps MS has been 'educating' the masses for decades now, to the effect that the average customer doesn't know any better than PC == windows, and that virtually all well-known (a.k.a. commercially or semi-commercially funded and thus advertised) software is written for the Windows platform. These things don't just wear off in a year or two, even when better or cheaper alternatives are available. People like what they're used to, so much that most consumers would prefer a mediocre windows full of bugs and security flaws over a (hypothetical) OS that is completely bug free, makes your computer twice as fast, costs nothing at all, but requires you to re-learn everything you know about computers.
I'm not saying Linux is better (it is for me, for most use cases). I'm not saying Microsoft must die either. What I'm saying is that some real competition in the OS market would be healthier (the short rise of linux-based netbooks and the increased popularity of Ubuntu already provided enough pressure for Microsoft to make sure 7 shipped fast and was substantially better than Vista), and that some of the things Microsoft did and does in terms of marketing and PR are morally wrong.

But in the real world the windows machine would require some malware/antivirus engine running in the background too. If it was Mcafee's junk then you'd seen a huge difference there also.

Linux isn't faster for me because comparable code runs faster. It's faster because it allows me to optimize my workflow for developer performance, that is, it offers me more ways of automating myself. In windows, you never really get past the clicking; on *nix systems, virtually everything is scriptable, so no matter how complex things get or how many individual programs are involved, I can arrange things so that I can fire it with a single command.
Also, windows makes me wait. A lot. Not because it's inefficient in what it does, but because it does things it assumes I might need while in reality I don't.