As part of my work-from-home job, I had to visit the Dell website. Now, I have no plans to ever buy a non-Apple again, but sometimes it's fun to just pretend. So I went browsing to see what kind of machine I could put together. I was interested in the Inspiron 537 desktop, just because they come in such neat colors.
Okay, so to the point. The base price includes Windows 7 Premium. For an extra $100 (from base price), you can get Windows 7 Professional (I assume this is what I would want?). For an extra $120 (from base price) you can get Windows 7 Ultimate.
For an extra $120 (from base price), you can get Windows XP.
Windows XP must have paid for its development 200 times over already. That thing is nothing but profit at this point. So charging so much money for something that should be basically free is just cruelty. And yet there is software that I use professionally which isn't tried on Windows 7 (still barely works in Vista). So at this point, I would have no option but to pay this "not sure yet" tax.