Everybody loves to have a go at Microsoft and Bill Gates, for a wide variety of reasons. Ninety percent of this vitriol is simply unjustified and unfair and is born of a deep rooted jealousy that such an ugly, four-eyed streak of piss with no personality can become the richest man in the World.
However, this whole thing with Windows XP being tied to your hardware annoys me because it not only means that you encounter problems everytime you change your motherboard, but because Gates and co actually owe their massive installed base to the fact that everybody copied their shit MS-DOS and early Windows operating systems in the first place. Now they have got everybody hooked, they start trying to get everybody to pay up if they want to go on using their machine.
A paranoid person, or in my case a drunk person, could be forgiven for thinking that many of these security holes are deliberately put in, so that a virus can take out your machine. The only way round this is to sign control of your PC over to Microsoft and allow the Corporation to manage your patches and do whatever else it likes to your machine. It doesn't take a great leap of a drunken imagination of someone who spends far too much time on the internet, to speculate from this that Gate's ultimate aim is to control all the computers on the internet.