Adventures in upgrading, The Software Saga
I sat down and looked through all my installed programs. I realized I had many that were older programs that I had upgraded, but the older versions were still active and installed. I also noticed just how many of those factory programs were eating up space and processor time. So, I went through my system deleting old programs and cleaning out unused stuff. I use a scrubber that also edits the registry to clean out the stuff as well. After all that things ran really well. For about a week. Then I started getting random errors again. Finally I lost the ability to play music and video. I decided some extreme measures were now needed.
I weighed the options. Since this was an OEM Windows XP setup there was no install disc. All I had was a recovery set and I sure did not want to recover all that garbage I didn't need. I did have a version of XP on disc, but it was given to me by a friend and was not legal in that respect, so I didn't really want to use it. After a night of thinking, while watching the computer grinding to a halt several times, I decided to get a legal version of Windows7. I headed over to Microsoft and ran their utility to check what could actually use. No problems arose with anything, so I picked out the Windows7 64-bit. I bought it and downloaded it and fell asleep waiting for it.
The next day, the first problem came when I unpacked it and did an install. It gave an error. It took about half an hour to find the error on the web. It simply meant “Windows7 64-bit is not compatible with your 32-bit OS” which was really annoying, to say the least. All my hardware is 64-bit compliant, but the Windows XP was not, and refused to use the 64-bit install. The only way to do that would be to wipe the drive and start from nothing.
Most of my files are on a terabyte server, so nothing would really be lost from a hard drive wipe, mind you. The problem came from something else. I could not get a bootable anything to work. I tried DVD, CD, and even booting from a USB stick. Anything other than the hard drive gave a “Insert bootable media and press any key to continue” message. I wasted half a day trying to figure that out. Finally I figured I would just get the 32-bit version of Windows7 and use that, seeing as how they are part of the packaged deal. When I went to download it, Microsoft said “the files are currently unavailable, please try again later.” After checking around I realized they did that on purpose to prevent multiple file downloads. How sneaky of them. I called their customer service line and asked “When are the files going to become available?” I think I may have been slightly upset. After confirming my account and serial numbers and such, they emailed the files directly to me. I didn't even ask for that, they just did it, which really amazes me.
So, I tried the install and found that the OEM old computer had set up a partition of maintenance files. This was why I could not really delete any of them. I still had to wipe the drive to clear that, and I still had no way of booting off anything but the hard drive. So, I whipped out the copy of XP my friend had given to me, and managed to get that to boot up, clear the partition, wipe the drive, and setup a throw-away basic OS. Then I ran the Windows7 installer and had zero problems getting everything to work.
Wait. Did you see that? I used an open source / broken OS to get things running, and it gave me zero problems after more than 14 hours of trying to get a licensed version to fail in new ways. I really hate the whole licensing thing.
The total install took from about 4am Sunday morning to about 11pm Monday evening. The last problem I had was upgrading some of the drivers, and one managed to knock a different out, so I had to re-install the other to prevent an error. After that, nothing. No problems. No issues.
Well, one minor issue. I am trying to figure out how to get my programs back on and running, but they all have bad registration codes. Hmm.