One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

I need a new hobby.

I started off Friday trying to reinstall Windows in my Bootcamp partition so I could use the newest Parallels beta. Among the zillion or so cool things it can do, it can use the Bootcamp Windows XP as a virtual machine. The obvious neat part being that you don’t have to waste disk space on the same OS twice, or do double the effort to get two different copies of Windows set up the way you want. So let’s run through the crazy fucking shit I have been through this weekend:

• Installed MSDN XP SP2 in bootcamp. Went seamlessly once I figured out that the Mighty Mouse fucks up XP’s USB driver but good.
• Installed Parallels tools and rebooted to set up Parallels vm. Parallels creates an alternative HW profile that can be used to boot XP. No problem, or so I thought. XP needed to be activated so I rebooted into Bootcamp and activated it.
• Upon rebooting into OSX and starting Parallels XP asks to be activated again. Uh-oh. Checked Parallels forum and it turns out this is a MAJOR problem, XP ends up asking for activation every time you change boot method. Fuck. Only solution at present is to use a corporate copy.
• I try to install from my corporate media. It’s only SP1. The install works, and completes OK. Thank God for small miracles.
• I download a copy of SP2 and try to install it. No go, the installer is stupid and it breaks. Keeps demanding for 4 additional megabytes (yeah, you heard me) of disk space. There are 20 or so gigs of unused space. Fuck. I guess it’s getting confused by my HFS partition, or something. I figure there’s no way to make this work, since I can’t exactly delete the HFS partition, so I go to the alternate plan: slipstream a copy of SP2 onto my corp media. Can’t be that hard, right?
• I go to work on my gaming rig trying to do the slipstreaming. I use CDBurnerXP these days as it’s free and very fast. But it doesn’t support some of the nitpicky little gotchas needed to burn a bootable XP media. Double fuck.
• I install Nero 7 to burn the disc. This would be the last time I ever see my desktop XP install alive. After installing Nero, my system just does crazy weird shit – it boots up to 640×480x4bit color, gives me all sorts of crazy weird messages anytime I try and do *anything*. Try the usual shit to fix it, nogo, it’s totally boned.
• Try to boot gaming rig to XP media. Works. Media doesn’t see old XP install. So much for in-place upgrade, it’s totally fucking hosex0red. Do a parallel install so I can get all my Usenet shit off the C drive.
• Reformat my handy dandy portable USB disk so I can copy the few gigs of useful shit I actually need off the C disk. It locks up during the copy. FUCK Try again. They say insanity is repeating the same action and expecting different results, so I don’t try it a 3rd time. Try copying to another hard drive I have, seems to work. Hm. nVidia chipset weirdness, probably. Fucking USB.
• Finally get the OS reinstalled on the ol’ gamin’ rig. Install Nero. Run through the slipstream process. Burn another media. IT BOOTS! Finally it fucking boots. Fuck. FUCK. That’s 48 hours of my life I won’t get back.

Conclusion:
Windows activation screws up everything good, and makes it so if you’re using Windows in the slightest of odd configurations, you’re fucked no matter how much you want to be legal. At this point it really shouldn’t be much of a mystery as to why I don’t like it.

So, after all that, what was the point? I’d say this was the point. Check out *nix/X, OS X, and Windows apps running together on the same box.

Striking, ain’t it?

Check out this awesome Irn-Bru ad. It’s so awesome I might have to buy some.