Thank you, Microsoft

Dear Mr Gates,

I'd like to thank you for wasting many hours of my time, trying to install a perfectly legal copy of Windows XP.

You see, my father-in-law's PC is old and decrepit. Being the helpful chap I am, I specified a new barebones PC for him, swapped some components from his old one, backed up his data and set about installing his legally purchased copy of Windows XP onto the new machine.

It is here that I hit a snag. Because I was installing onto a SATA drive I was unable to use the CD supplied by his computer vendor. This CD is essentially a "recovery" CD of the type that wants to boot up and start copying files over to the hard-disk in order to run. When you have a SATA drive, Windows Setup can't see it until you give it a driver floppy. And you can't do this until after the files have been copied. I commend you on this, it is a brilliant bit of circular thinking. I did try putting the old IDE drive in to accomodate this problem, but the install still wouldn't accept the Product Key. This would prove to be a big problem.

So instead I tried to use my own Windows XP CD, in conjunction with his Product Key. Initially this seemed to be working fine. I was able to press F6 and specify additional drivers, meaning I could use the SATA drive. For some reason Setup decided it wouldn't work with the IDE drive plugged in as well (something about it needing to write a boot sector to it but not being able to, with the "helpful" advice to delete a partition from it), so I had to remove this and start again. No matter; a trivial inconvenience. Windows then started to install itself onto the SATA drive and all was going well. Twenty minutes or so passed, and then it thought to ask for the Product Key again. It wouldn't accept it. A bit of thinking made me realise that my XP CD is a retail copy, and his Product Key is an OEM one. Never mind that it is a perfectly legal copy, it wouldn't accept it. Incidentally, how about asking for the Product Key right at the beginning, therefore saving twenty minutes of waiting and pointless file copying?

Realising I was getting nowhere, I threw your EULA to the wind, copied my CD to my laptop hard-disk, modified the SETUPP.INI file to fool it into thinking it was an OEM copy, and with the help of ISOBuster created a new setup CD. I then retired for the night.

The next evening I tried again. It discovered the half-completed installation and I decided to let Setup repair it. This was obviously as mistake as the repair process done by Setup is about as good as the job done by the handyman who tried to fix my leaking shower. However, it did take the Product key, which was encouraging.

I then had to re-format the drive and re-install again with my hacked CD. This worked with the OEM Product Key, and Windows was also activated online with no problems. Windows Genuine Advantage also had no issues with this.

So, evidentally this was a legal copy of Windows. It shouldn't be this hard to install the damn thing. I spent a lot of time Googling (not MSN Searching) for solutions. Many people had the same problem, and none of them seemed to solve it. Most of them resorted to buying a new copy of Windows XP. Crazy when they already have a valid licence, but obviously a good money-spinner for Microsoft.

All in all I wasted about 8 hours due to this. Please let me know where to send the invoice for my time.

Yours sincerely,


Neil D.