Brainpiercing

Some Laptops offer hardware encryption of files, notably some HP business-line laptops - in conjunction with fingerprint authentication, even, and possibly some Stinkpads, too. If it's really important you might consider changing your laptop. Do look at the individual configuration though.

As far as I know the Microsoft does not bind the license to the installation medium. So you can basically sell burned copies or preinstalled copies, as long as you resell the licenses under the conditions stated in the OEM contract, and give out the license stickers with the serial numbers. You should check whether the EULA of any particular OEM installation specifically refers to the medium, or just the software. But I'm not an actual authority on this, so don't sue me if it's wrong.

Hmm, good. Because I HAVE been using a 200GB SATA drive for about two years now, without problems, although not as a boot drive. Recently however a crash corrupted the registry to the point it had to be overwritten by an OLD copy. And there were no SATA drivers in that copy, so I was quite scared. Luckily, I wrote nothing to the disk until the SATA-drivers were installed again. (By way of explanation: Even though I consider myself somewhat an enthusiast, this installation of Win98SE I am running is the same one I did for my old setup of hardware about five or six years ago, and it hasn't been reinstalled even after exchanging basically every component except the harddisk about three years ago. Win98 is so tolerant of hardware changes....)

Do the >137MB problems only apply to IDE or to SATA as well?