How Windows can destroy your productivity, even if you’re using a Mac:

1. Reinstall Virtual PC after deciding to do a full overhaul of your hard drive structure (getting rid of partitions, etc.)
2. Watch Virtual PC install flawlessly.
3. Try to install Windows ‘98
4. Drum fingers for 45 minutes while it grinds away, requiring numerous restarts so it can “builds databases” or whatever the hell it does.
5. Fatal Exception error upon restart. Files missing.
6. Try to re-install Windows ‘98
7. Drum fingers for 45 minutes.
8. Appears to install ok, but blank screen (on Windows, not the Mac), nothing but a cursor appearing. Try various things, fail.
9. Trash drive image, recreate new one from scratch.
10. Try to re-install Windows ‘98 one more time.
11. Drum fingers for 45 minutes.
12. Install goes through ok, except that various hardware drivers are missing, including the video card driver (of course, I’m seeing this, so obviously the video is coming through), audio driver (no sound from Windows), and ethernet driver (no ‘net access via Windows).
13. Attempt to install missing drivers. Some go through fine, others “can’t be found.”
14. Trash drive image, recreate new one from scratch.
15. Install Windows 2000 instead.
16. Drum fingers for 45 minutes.
17. Success (yee-hah).
18. Install Quickbooks 2000 Pro (which is the only reason I need VPC in the first place).
19. Drum fingers for 10 minutes.
20. SUCCESS (except that over half my workday has now been wasted just trying to get my Quickbooks account accessible).

Sheesh.

I feel—I mean, I’ve felt your pain.

yeah. I’ve been there too.  Actually, I kept a cd burned of the whole installation with the HD image and all to restore to if I need it.  I’ve used it several times.  Way easier then the normal reinstall. 

But now, VPC 5 doesn’t let that work

When I got my Ibook, I was faced with this issue too How to deal with old Windows apps that I needed to run?

My preference was to not have anything that said MSFT polluting my MAc, but I had to share Word, Excel, and PPT files with clients and coworkers, so I bought Office v.X.

But I have an ecopy of the telecom LSSGR standards that requires Windows, so I looked into those applications. Finding out that I not only needed to install that software, but also a copy of Windows (either 98 or 2K) was too much for me—I could not do this thing.

So, I have several old Socket 7 PCs and I hot-rodded one to run Visio, plus support the few odd Win-only apps I had, like the LSSGR. I found that my Socket 7 system with an AMD K6-3 cpu overclocked to 458 MHz ran Visio acceptably, for my needs (on W2K).

The whole experience makes me wonder why I would need to puchase a 2 GHz wintel box (as some keep saying everyone needs), since I got what I needed from my 5 year old system.

So, it is a dilemma keep an old wintel box around or use this software? Since one of the experiences I had with MSFT products that drove me to the Mac was that their software always seemed to “foul up” an otherwise good running system, the choice was easy for me. I don’t want anything to do with a registry ever again, at least not on my Macs!