Microsoft is phasing out XP in favor of Vista and the cadre of hardware vendors are following suit. So if you really want an XP box, you’d better hurry up. Dell will stop taking orders for XP on June 18, Hewlett-Packard’s cutoff date is June 10; Lenovo’s is June 15. Gateway says it will sell XP systems until the end of the month, but when contrinuting editor Bill Snyder called the company’s sales line he found “there are no longer any XP machines in stock and that none (as far as the sales rep knew) would be available.” “Although XP-loaded consumer systems are soon to be gone, there is a basketful of loopholes that some people will be able to exploit to get XP on new systems,” Snyder writes in Last call for Windows XP PCs is mid-June. Software Development