> We recently moved our product from only working on hardware supplied by
> us, to working on ANY arbitrary PC that meets the minimum specifications.
>
> This causes an explosion of possible test combinations.

I should maybe point out that our "product" isn't just some application 
that you install with Windows Installer. It's an entire 
custom-configured operating system. So we have to check that we have 
drivers for every device known to man. The product also interacts 
closely with the hardware, further complicating matters.

If we were just building a word-processor then... yeah, it probably 
wouldn't matter what hardware you run it on. So long as your OS works, 
our product should work. But we're not; we're building an entire OS.

Fortunately, the OS is Linux, and those guys have been making bootable 
live-CDs for years now. Even so, we still hit snags from time to time...

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