I accomplished things this past weekend. Not many things, but important things none the less. Long time readers may remember that about a year and a half ago or so, the motherboard inside my home PC kicked the bucket and required replacing. Those exact same long time readers may also remember that I run Windows XP on my home system, and Windows XP does not like having certain parts swapped out without at least two weeks notice and an application filled out in triplicate for said swapping. It's kind of annoying like that. It took me about a week and half to sort out that mess last time, ultimately ending in me reinstalling XP and crying myself to sleep.
That was last time though. This time, forms were filled out and notice was given. It was time for an upgrade.
Quick note for anyone that's planning on doing this: Lock up all of your fire arms and hide the keys. This is important because when you upgrade your motherboard, you then have to do a repair install of Windows XP (but not the first repair option when you boot up from you XP installation CD, you select the regular install, then when it detects an existing installation, it asks you if you want to repair, then you say yes.). When you do that, it basically reverts back to the original version, meaning no Service Packs or updates to the OS of any kind. It will however, retain upgrades to certain programs like Internet Explorer. This is where you will be happy that you've safely locked up all of your fire arms and hidden the keys. It turns out, IE7 requires that you have Service Pack 2 installed, however, in order to get Service Pack 2, you need to go through Windows Update using IE 5 or later. Windows will not allow you to un-install IE7, nor will it allow you install an earlier version as it will only tell you that a newer version is currently installed, thus aborting any pre IE7 installations. It's a bit of a catch 22. In my humble opinion, this was a very, very bad idea on Microsoft's part. The only way I got around it was to download the IT version of SP2 using Firefox, which is approximately 277 MB. Not impossible to do, but not as easy as the updater usually is.
I managed to perform this whole operation in about 12 hours. I'd say it was probably around hour 8 that things got particularly nasty. I was staring at a desktop with no icons, task bar or start button and several error messages about not being able to access the entry point for any number of programs. I'll admit, I wasn't very optimistic at the time. But 4 hours later, I had my baby back up and running normally with all of my programs and personal settings intact. Only now, I was running a dual core processor with 2 gigs of RAM. Was it worth it? I'm obligated to say yes because if I don't, I will immediately be nominated for Biggest Tool of the Year, but really, it was worth it. I'm looking to do some more multi-tasking these days, and I believe this will help.
I performed no less than 2,030,205,200 reboots during the whole process and I can honestly say when I performed the final one and was immediately informed by my computer that it was now out of date and that they offer quad core processors, I felt exceptionally good about myself and what I had accomplished. Normally I'm not such a braggadocio, but this time, I think I really did something nobody else on the planet has ever accomplished. I brought my personal technology right up into 2006.
