I have been using the same machine at the office for the past few years. In that time I have upgraded the hardware from time to time, had hardware go bad and had all out system failures. If I needed to, I had the Windows XP install disk that I could do a repair from and it would be an effortless thing. Boot from the disk, press a few keys, hit “R” to do a repair install. It takes all of the core system files and puts them back to the originals from the cd. All of your files are still there and your system boots up as if nothing had happened.

So since I am who I am at the company, my machine was elected to be upgraded to Windows Vista Business edition. No real problem for me, I turn off most of the features that make people crazy, like the User Account Control. So things were fine and dandy with the system running as it was, I even upgraded to SP1.

Disaster struck last week when my motherboard died and I was forced (poor me) to upgrade most components since the socket is no longer supported. So as I figured, the change of hardware caused Windows to fail to boot as I’ve seen so many times before.

Here’s where the pissing me off part happens. I downloaded my copy of Vista where I was directed to from Microsoft’s website…Digital Locker. Nice program, worked perfectly. Click, Pay, Download and the installer runs right from your desktop, installing the new OS as you wait. When you finish, you can even make a backup CD/DVD of what was downloaded. Sounds like a dream except that the DVD isn’t bootable with the upgrade version. So now to get the machine running, you have to take your old version of Windows (XP Professional for me) and do either a completely clean install (format) or a clean directory install (new windows directory)…no repair.

Long story short, I have to take my existing install of Windows Vista Business, install Windows XP Professional on the machine, keeping all the data but losing all registry and install data for existing programs already installed…so once finished installing XP I have to redo my settings, my programs, everything. Then once all updates have finished I can reinstall Vista.

Wait…reinstall Vista??? I’d be crazy to do that without a genuine BOOT DISK.