Just months after planning a break for the world of Mac, I'm planning on diving further into Windows. For that, I am sorry

Essentially, I'm in the process of purchasing Windows 7 upgrades for the three computers in our household.

For the first, I have a copy of Windows XP 64 that should cover it.

For the second, my laptop, I'm really hoping that the recovery CD counts. I have an MSI Wind and a USB DVD drive, but I haven't been able to find out how that will work with just the recovery disc, if at all.

It's the third computer I need help with. At one point I bought an OEM copy (through Newegg) of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. I recently found the case with the discs inside it...all except disc one. D'oh! Now I've been trying to find a way to get that disc replaced, but have come up empty. The guy on the phone at MS was unsurprisingly unhelpful, and couldn't even tell me if this was feasible or not.

Naturally, it's my fault I lost the disc, though through 3 moves since I bought that OS it's a wonder I can still find anything. I'm just hoping there's some recourse for me. Does anyone know of one?

Thanks for your help.

This all really makes me appreciate Steam.

Do you really need the discs? Won't the installed serial number alone do?

I doubt it. The upgrade installations (as I remember them) do some pretty extreme checking to make certain that they're actually installing atop a qualifying OS (or installing with an actual Microsoft CD available). I don't even know if a recovery CD will function or not.

It's really a shame Microsoft is yet again making a simple process complex. Suckering people in with 50% discounts on upgrades before the OS is even final. Not offering a discount to the most loyal (ultimate) buyers. Still a maze of editions to choose from. And rumors of a family pack off in the distance.

Linux users just download their upgrades for free, and OS X users just hand over $29 or $49 for a family pack to upgrade. Microsoft? I can't even summarize quickly with all the various editions, upgrade paths, and discounts.

I think you're overcomplicating it a tiny bit, but I agree it's not as good as those other two situations.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Suckering people in with 50% discounts on upgrades before the OS is even final." I'm using the OS right now and it's final enough for me! And I don't mind paying for the upgrade now because I know I want it anyway. I can't tell you how much more pleased I am with 7 than I am with Vista, and I'm currently running XP on all the computers here, so it'll be an even bigger jump.

In summary: I'm happy. Let me be happy

It's … complex … for individual users. It's nightmarish for corporate licensing.

It's a good deal for people like yourself who already know they want to upgrade and aren't having compatibility problems. But for people like myself, it sucks. Windows 7 definitely isn't final yet, and it has shown me problems that I don't get in Vista. The most humorous one is that a Microsoft developed and published game that required Vista is failing to run properly in 7. So do I shell out $100 now to upgrade, and risk not knowing if these problems will be fixed? Or do I hold off, and wait till it ships and pay $200 to upgrade?

Overall, the tactic is pushing me farther away from Microsoft. And thats not what they should be doing right now. All it does in reinforce my image of the company being so greedy and monopolistic that they are willing to force their user base to pay a large sum of money to get away from the worst OS they have shipped. Even Apple knew better then to charge users for 10.1 after 10.0 would up being a dud.

If your happy with the situation, then thats great. There are still plenty of us out here being burned by Microsoft on a daily basis, and so we hold quite the grudge against them. As much as I would love to go 100% away from Microsoft, their monopoly has ensured that I'd have to leave my industry to do so. I want Microsoft to either do better, or just die off. And sadly it looks like neither of those two possibilities are likely to happen anytime soon.

Much as I hate to recommend it, I think the logical action is to stretch the bounds of what they'll let you get away with via telephone activation. At least in older versions of Windows, when the automatic activation fails, it bottoms out to "give us a call at 1-800-xxx-xxxx." You may be able to leverage the phone mechanism to work around the restrictions.

Worse than Windows Me? Worse than WinCE?

Why can't you feed two of the computers the same old OS cd at install time?

Why would *anybody* shell out their hard-earned, after-tax money, for operating systems software???

I mean, this stuff has been available for free for a decade and a half now, and it's not like it will balance your chequebook or store your recipes any better if you pay money for it!!

Solitare is just as boring whether it has cloudy sheep hills in the background or a cool muddy bird skeleton!

And office software runs on it whether it cost money or not, and heck.. even the office software can be legally free.

Bizarre..

I mean, sure, corporations are stupid with money for this kind of stuff, but at least with them it's pre-tax deductions, not after tax like with real people.

But if you've got money to burn.. well, go for it I suppose.

-ml

I do that all the time, actually

But unfortunately, that's not the problem I have here. I have the proper activation code, I just don't have the actual install CD.

What I've heard is that 7 might not even need an installed OS, it just needs for you to put in the old discs at the time of install to verify that you have them. That's why I need the lost disc, and I can't figure out how to replace it.

Isn't that how xp and 2k did it ? I remember having to do that with either xp or 2k when doing a new install.

Do you think microsoft will know that you're putting in the same CD twice and not different CDs?

There's the letter of MS licensing and there's the spirit of it. In this case though, the letter of MS licensing says that possession of media is of no value, it's all about the COA.

The upgrade shenanigans are just there to keep honest people banging their head against the wall.

Yes.

Windows ME - It was pretty bad, but at least people did have an easy time either sticking with Windows 98 or moving to Windows 2000. The one system I helped maintain with Windows ME showed very little additional problems beyond the general flakiness of the Win9x series in general.

Windows CE - Depends on the version and device. Windows Mobile devices are definitely near the bottom of my list for a smartphone, but they don't strike me as having the same severity of issues Vista has.

Vista has managed to do tons more harm then either CE or ME. It has computer manufacturers actively seeking ways to be able to still offer XP nearly 3 years after Vista shipped.

Windows 7 is what Vista should have been when it shipped. But MS was caught with their pants down when it came to security and ensuring .Net was ready. What shipped was written in 18 months, starting from the code base of Server 2003 SP1 and a declaration that no components could be built with .Net. In other words, 48 months worth of work was tossed away, and a rushed OS was released that caught driver makers, computer manufacturers, business and consumers by surprise.

Ultimately I think Microsoft needs to copy Apple's business plan of the late 90s. Flush the OS, get something new from somewhere (singularity maybe), and spend a bit of effort in putting in just enough backwards compatibility to allow people to make the jump. MS is just hauling way too much baggage in the OS these days with ancient APIs, duct tape over all the known security holes, and an architecture that isn't ready for highly multicore systems.

Yup, re-installed XP SP3 upgrade on a machine yesterday, needed to insert the Win2K disk to complete install.

Maybe Google will force them down that road sooner than planned?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8139711.stm

The most surprising part of that article: GMail is out of beta! I hadn't even noticed

The one thing they don't address in that article is how challenging it will be for software makers to create Chrome versions of their products. That should be interesting for a "boot instantly" OS.

And Mac users must be pleased by that analyst's assertions that this would be the first contender against Microsoft

I'm one of the biggest Google fanboys you'll come across, but I'm skeptical about the chances for success of this OS. At best, I can see it as a dual-boot on my netbook. I can't truly see it as an OS for my desktop.

Ooo...can either of you verify that the same disc could be used on two upgrade discs? Because that would make this so much simpler! The one truly official disc I have is that XP 64 disc, unfortunately.

I have, so it's worth trying but there are sooo many variants of any OS out there and the way they're packaged that you'll only know if you try.

Apple also offer a very clear cut-off date where purchasers of the current OS, or machines with the current OS, qualify for free upgrades (pay for shipping) to the new OS. I can't remember off hand how they pick the date, but it's always announced when the new OS is officially announced/priced/dated.

Microsoft has made even that, extremely confusing and difficult. I really don't see myself ever paying for any portion of another MS OS in any way, shape or form. I also don't ever see myself moving my two only Windows systems away from XP, unless it's one of them to Linux.

I do see running Linux full-time, perhaps on one of those two systems or on a new system to replace one or both of them at some point. However, I can't imagine recommending Linux to a friend who isn't already extremely computer savvy. Unless of course it was a system I knew would be dedicated to very specific tasks ahead of time. BUt that really depends on the tasks and of course the users. Not great for the crowd that loves to double-click exe's from emails for instance.

Google hasn't said anything about the software APIs for this new operating system (have they?). Presumably, they'll want to leverage all the work on their Android platform and make that the client-side API of choice. The alternative is either high-level JavaScript programming (good for widgets, but you wouldn't write serious apps) or exposing the Linux guts below (presumably, something you want to avoid to stay nimble in your ability to evolve the platform, such as to non-x86 processors).

No, they have specifically said that they won't be using Android for Chrome OS. Chrome OS is very much aimed at running web app.

They said in their blog post that their apps target for Chrome OS will also run on other standards compliant browsers, by which I assume that they mean they'll be HTML5 apps.

They have proved with Chrome that they can make Javascript fast. They do need to do some work around the Google docs still to make things faster though, things like inserting rows in the spreadsheet still take an age (though not due to Javscript speed, more down to a slow server round trip).

The Google docs apps however are already at the point, when running in a recent webkit browser, that most users wouldn't notice they weren't native apps (especially when using the Chrome option to appify a web page).

Another OS upheaval might be happening at Sun, talking to a Sun engineer the other day he seemed to think Oracle was only really interested in Sun so they could engineer an Oracle specific OS, pared down so that that's all it does.

No real implication for the desktop market but I guess something else for MS (and all the linux people) to worry about at the enterprise end.

With a squeeze at either end we might see Linux and Windows make a jump they wouldn't otherwise have made.

Because sometimes the necessary apps aren't available on the free operating systems, don't run well on a virtual machine, or aren't supported by projects like Wine.

And sometimes, when someone like my parents pay money, they don't have any qualms about going to someplace like Apple's Genius Bar, rather than pestering me with computer questions that I can't answer, since I don't have a mac.

But otherwise, I'm with you.

My answer to that question is pretty much the same: Apps. In my case, mostly games, but also some audio and image editing packages.

But the more I think about my experiences with various Linux distros, the more I realize that part of what I prefer about windows is its "feel". I just like the way the Windows GUI "feels". There's something about the way the mouse and keyboard respond to my input that I prefer. It's probably just that I'm used to Windows, and I could just as easily get used to Linux given enough time.

I can't really give any concrete examples, but it's got to do with the way the mouse pointer moves, the way the GUI elements (buttons, checkboxes, etc) respond, and the way it feels to navigate the GUI. Something about Windows gives me a more solid feel, whereas when I'm in one of the Linux distros, I feel like I have to carefully move my mouse and be more precise with my clicks and drags. Almost as if the hotspot pixel in the mouse pointer cursor is in the wrong place in Linux and I have to adjust my behavior to compensate. Especially when doing things like dragging window borders or navigating menus and lists.

Mac OS X is almost as bad in this regard, although I'm starting to get used to the way a Mac feels and I can sort of get around without feeling like I'm about to fall off a cliff. But there are still moments when I feel like "dammit, I clicked on that checkbox, why didn't it check?!"

Yep, Linux. A coworker was saying that "it's just going to be another Linux distribution", and I was arguing against that, but found that they are intending Chrome OS to use a Linux kernel.


Of course, there's a lot more to a Linux distribution than just the kernel, and I wouldn't be surprised if their userland was totally different, but Linux is certainly involved.

That, my friend, is called old age On the other hand, I can't stand to use a touchpad on a Windows laptop any more because I've gotten used to all the multi-touch capabilities of OS X.



Which, when you think about it, is what Apple did when they built OS X on top of a BSD kernel. IMHO, it's a recipe for success.

Darwin is a Mach kernel with some BSD subsystems and IO Kit bolted on.

I have the exact opposite problem. I despise how Windows "feels". It does everything wrong. I spend inordinate amounts of time getting Windows to do things properly.

For one thing, you have to use the GUI for everything. I've spent a few weeks trying to do some basic command-line scripting of some stuff for automated installations and, while I'm surprised to find that I actually can do almost anything from the command line, it has hardened my feeling that Windows is a motley hodgepodge. You know how when you configure stuff in Windows and two things that seem related have their checkboxes in totally different configuration panels? It's the same way for the command line utilities. Everything is its own little world.

dsquery.exe to find domain usernames
devcon.exe to "safely remove hardware"
msiexec.exe to uninstall a program
netdom.exe to join a domain
netdom.exe to rename the computer if it's in a domain
wmic.exe to rename the computer if it's not in a domain
net.exe to modify the local groups
reg.exe to modify the registry
schtasks.exe to edit the scheduler

And, of course, many of these commands aren't included on the OS disc, much less installed by default.

I can have the Scheduler run a program at boot time, pre-login, and I can have the Scheduler run a program only one time. But I can't have it run once pre-login. Or I can edit a registry key to have Windows run a program on each boot or only once, but it will only be run post-login. Or I can set up a service to run a program on each boot. So I had to schedule a program to run once at boot, and have it be a batch file that removes the scheduled task and then does what I wanted to do in the first place.

Autologins can be set up with some registry values under "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\". Virtually everything else is under "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\". There's an associated "DefaultDomain" value that's documented, but it doesn't seem to actually do anything. Instead, you have to put the domain in the "DefaultUserName" value. And let's not ignore that registry folders are called "keys", keys are called "values", and values are called "data".

If I join a domain using the GUI, I can change the hostname at the same time. When you do this with the command line tools, you have to join the domain with netdom.exe, then change the name with netdom.exe. If you try to do the more logical thing of changing the computer name first, netdom.exe won't let you do it because the computer's not in the domain, but if you use wmic.exe, the name change doesn't take effect until reboot, which means if you then join the domain without rebooting, you join as the old name.

And wmic.exe seems to do a lot of stuff, but I've never seen anyone recommend it for anything else. I guess it's just a shell interface to management APIs. Maybe it's the unifying command I'm looking for.

Of course, Unix is this way, too, except everything usually involves editing a text file. But Unix is up-front about being a collection of utilities, while Windows pretends that it's all unified. I guess my problem is more with the overlap than with the separateness.