Windows XP and Windows Vista

S**t happened around holidays - My wife's monster PC was shut down in one evening with the usual Window$ manner - start - shutdown. Next morning the "themes" where gone/corrupted. You might ask why the themes matter... well, the themes service drives the look and feel of Windows , application and specifically the web browser.

I spent a good while reading on the web about the corrupt themes (and trust me, it happens a lot) but none of the solutions offered would work. I spent countless hours trying to fix it, including booting from XP CD and run the "repair my windows" function without success.

I then asked my wife to run to Costco and buy me a retail upgrade to Vista Ultimate (stupidly, I thought that I'll just bite the bullet and install the new Windows). I got it new year's eve and decided to launch the upgrade... I should have known better...

Vista identified few drivers and apps as not working with it... OK no biggie... I uninstalled them. After that we started the install. Once the first reboot came, I got the dreaded blue screen of death with no meaningful explanation... nice... OK. I thought, let's just boot back to the XP... WRONG! Vista upgrade had already screwed up the boot block making it impossible to go back to the original XP which was slightly broken...

So after a while of pulling all non-essential hardware (and some essential like memory) out of the box, I tried to boot again. Nope, wouldn't work. I even ended up putting the drive in my sons computer and long and behold, the machine would boot but not without.... LOOOOOOONNNNNGGG wait without any results.

Finally, I got upset, formatted the drive and installed WinXP instead. Once I got the XP going, I smartened up and took a backup of the boot drive for future use... But since I am stubborn, I tried to install Vista now on a IDE drive that is separate from XP and had plenty of space...

20 hours later, Vista had "expanded" 35% of the files and it was going to take longer than building the great wall of China to get this going... I cancelled the install (and thank god, Vista hadn't screwed up my XP). Since I am still stubborn, I read a bunch of stuff online and found out that Vista can be slow (i.e. impossible) to install on IDE drive and it also cannot be installed on dynamic partition on SATA disk (which I have), I decided to buy another SATA disk for Vista... Formatting and installing that with WD tools screwed up the XP this time around... NICE... and now I was left to NO WINDOWS in the box.

No worries, I booted off the Vista DVD and promised that I will put the key into it later... promised that I had bought the ultimate (what a joke) edition and that I could install it... It took DAMN 20 minutes to install it. Then I put some of the software like office 2003 on it because after several days, my wife wanted her files and emails...

Now comes the cool part - M$FT guys didn't think about this upgrade scenario, so my LEGALLY bought key DIDN'T work! Come on guys, I have all legal Windows versions from 98 to me to XP! At least XP knows to look at the original CD of the previous release to know that you can upgrade.

I was incredibly frustrated and was looking for a way to communicate with M$FT - although they wanted $49 to chat with me online... I guess spending $259 with them isn't enough to be able to get support... I almost called my friends who work at M$FT to get them to give me a key that works... Luckily, I read a blog that explained that you can upgrade Vista from - you guessed it - Vista. So I launched Vista upgrade with my key from Vista and less than 1 hour later, I had a fully functioning system which was activated...

Now was it worth it - definitely not from the time perspective - but I really do like the way it works and the little things like security, translucent windows etc. And I really like the fact that Roxio EMC 10 works better on Vista than on XP!

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