Hello MDL people, Wow, this is a great forum I've stumbled into. Had never heard of MDL (yes, I do live under a rock) until someone on another forum replied with a link to something here. Apparently as a nube I can't include links yet, so for your amusement, here's my text. Forum: eevblog, chat - topic: Sony's newest robo dog comes with a mandatory monthly fee Meanwhile I'm just sitting here slapping a Win7 install into bearable shape for my first time, and finding _that_ unacceptably online-hooked and painfully sh*tfull. What's the bet buyers of Sony's crapless yapper will have to enter a stupidly long 'product activation key' at some point? And if the dog doesn't have an online snitch line, it won't work? Hey, entirely unrelated, if one wanted to offline activate the dog7, so it thought it has 'Sony genuine product advantage' and stops complaining about not being legitimate, can anyone recommend an offline activation hack utility known to actually work? As opposed to loading up your dog7 with viruses. If your dog can't wake up any morning (for the next 15 years, or however long you can keep the hardware working) without access to the Net and some remote corporate servers, you don't have a dog. Same goes for an OS. Yep, I'm one of those diehards who stuck with WinXP this long, precisely because I found Win7's LOB (level of bullsh*t) unacceptable. You can imagine what I think of 8 and 10. But now I need a Win7 machine for some things, eg running NTLite, and reading some GPT HDDs. Btw, 'GPT' is an easy acronym for an urbexer to remember, since in stormwater drains it stands for Gross Pollutant Trap. Where all the rubbish swirls around and around. Very appropriate. A helpful soul linked me to Windows Loader v2.2.2. So here I am. Discovering there are many things here relevant to my interests. Multiple projects. Yes, I will ask questions in the appropriate threads. TerraHertz