I bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade [Home Premium to Professional Upgrade]. Microsoft says the upgrade will be easy and it has an XP compatibility mode for all those old programs I need to run. Plus I can set up Virtual Machines for things like DOS, Win3.3, Linux, XP, and who knows what else my devious mind can conjure. Maybe a Z-80 partition and virtual machine. Microsoft says it is going to be easy and will take around ten minutes. They lie.

You start off going to the Windows Anytime Upgrade gizmo under the Start button and give them the secret code that came with your (almost)empty box. You then can go to the download page and Microsoft gives you the privilege of downloading 500 MBytes of code. My speed was on the order of 1.5 MBytes a second. Not too shabby. If you have nothing else to do for 4 or 5 minutes. Then you run the sucker. It restarts the computer (the shutdown dance) 3 times with varying delays and dead times. Give it at least a half hour before you give up on it while it is in one of its idle modes.

Then I went here to get the VFirtual Machine stuff. Another significant load for your ISP. Well fine. You can fool around with that and see if you can get it to work. Or you can Read The Effen Manual. Which I highly recommend.

So any way I get some insight in the process and then I find this page which seems to work better. Which then takes you to this other page where you can do the actual downloads.

Click on XP Mode download then run the program. You then have to do the shutdown dance. Again. Only once though.

Then Virtual PC Mode - another shutdown. This is getting monotonous. And a lot longer than 10 minutes. And finally you get to do the Windows XP Mode update. Another restart. Yarghhhh!!!

Finally I'm done. More like an hour and a half or two later. Well there is the Virtual Machine Maker Icon under the Start menu. Excellent. I made a 2 GB virtual machine to see how it works. Looks good so far. I'm going to fool around some and see what I've got - by poking at it. Out of that 1 GB (roughly) of software there ought to be something useful. Like maybe I can use my schematic drafting program. After roughly three months without. But I do have about a fifth of a ream of schematic scribbles I have produced in the interim. Some transcribing is in order.

If I learn anything interesting or amusing I'll have another post. And if you would like the previous chapter of the saga you can go back to The Partitioning of An Area. Which has a link to the one before that.

Cross Posted at Power and Control