>Do you thing Microsoft allows staff that attends software launches to communicate with the outside world or allows them to have a life outside of the Microsoft Campus?
>

They're like our folks in Washington - listen to their own hype so much they wouldn't know the truth if it bit them in the butt.

>The HP XW6000 Workstation has the following hardware components.
>
>· Dual Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz processors
>· Intel E7505 chipset, dual-channel DDR SDRAM, 533MHz system bus
>· Integrated Ultra ATA/100 controller and dual-channel Ultra 320 SCSI controller
>· 512 MB PC2100 ECC SDRAM 266
>· 36 GB 10K RPM Ultra 160 SCSI HD
>· 48X CD ROM
>· Integrated Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet adapter
>· NVIDIA Quatro4 200 NVS AGP video adpater
>· Integrated SoundMAX digital audio adapter
>· USB 2.0 with four USB ports (two front, two rear)
>
>The standard Visual Studio .NET developer workstation image has the following software components.
>
>· Windows 2000 Professional SP3
>· Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1
>· Microsoft Internet Information Services 5.0
>· Acrobat Reader 5.05 with Search & Accessibility
>· Microsoft Office 2000 SP3 with Front Page 2000
>· Microsoft Image Composer 1.5
>· Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition SP3
>· Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 SP5 with MSDN Library (April 2001)
>· Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
>· Microsoft .NET Framework SP2
>· Microsoft .NET Framework Data Provider for ODBC
>· MDAC 2.7
>· Norton Antivirus Client 7.51.862
>
>Nice machine but I am already obsolete! I do not have Visual Studio 2003!

I should have such an obsolete piece of junk! The MS price to upgrade to 2003 is $29.00 for a limited time but I suspect you probably have an MSDN subscricption.