what's the difference between windows xp oem and retail, and for windows vista.

If I plan on changing hardware a lot is windows gonna think I switched computers and stop working on me?

Basically because of the nonstandardisation(actual word?) of the prefixes kilo, mega, etc either meaning 1000 OR 1024

Like when you buy a hard drive and it says 500GB, but it turns out to only have 465GB, reason being the maker of the drive uses decimal measurements, and your computer uses binary measurements.
so the new way is supposed to have seperate prefixes for the binary and decimal measurements

the Gigabyte the the hard drive maker is talking about is decimal, a billion bytes.

the "Gigabyte" that your computer is talking about is binary and equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes, and is now properly called a 'Gibibyte' for GigaBinary


one mebibyte    1 MiB = 1 048 576 B
one megabyte    1 MB = 1 000 000 B
one gibibyte    1 GiB = 1 073 741 824 B
one gigabyte    1 GB = 1 000 000 000 B

I haven't seen it outside of looking it up once I saw it on wikipedia, but apparantly DC++, a few bitTorrent clients, the linux kernel, etc are already using the standard suggested by the IEC which is actually 8 years old.

actually, I said I don't like talking about myself, not too myself... that's a whole nother story at $20/hour

I think I'm gonna fit in just fine...

I was wondering if anyone else ever heard about the proposed Binary Prefixes such as Kibi, Mebi, and Gibi, and what are your thoughts