Reverse Switching, Episode 7: WTF

Our household is in the process of eliminating our last working non-Apple machine. I bought the lady of the house (ok, lady #1 vs. Samantha who's been on a Powerbook since birth) a MacBook for her birthday. I put Parallels on it last night, installed Windows XP. No problems installing. But I kept getting some error whenver I tried Windows Update.

Google is good. After searching around for a long time, I found a way to fix the issue. I had to bless (or what seemed like the Windows equivalent of a unix bless) a bunch of files plus remove some folder. All worked fine. If you're considering a MacBook to run Windows, I highly recommend it. We're expecting more RAM tomorrow, but the thing runs stupid fast as is with 512MB. But I'd never leave a machine with only 512MB of RAM...

Parallels worked so good, I repartitioned my drive away from Bootcamp, installed the virtual machine stuff myself. Got all the way into the Windows install, entered my activation code. Then Windows said, "Hey, you've exceeded the number of installs for this, you're gonna be fucking around with customer service reps all night unless you want to buy a new key for $149."

Wow. I deleted the old install. Even got a new copy of XP for the MacBook (I'm not a software pirate). Still, Microsoft accused me of stealing. So I started the phone calls.

First, I get some machine that asks me to give a 48 digit authentication code. I had to read six digits at a time, I could see the cursor blinking on each group of six...clearly I was being monitored over the network. I read the full thing (took forever as the damned robot lady kept asking me to confirm each group). At the end, the robot lady said she couldn't activate the OS. So she sent me off to a human in The Philippines.

The human only asked for the first six digits of the 48. I assume she was smart enough to see my machine on her side (this bit is scary). After asking me a bunch of questions to see if I was a thief (and again, I'm not, but I'd have surely lied if I was), she read off another 48 digit code that I had to type in.

So I'm up and running again. Parallels is slick. I'm glad I got 40 MB of drive space back for OS X, cause I hope to never go into Windows again. All hell breaks loose everytime I touch the thing. I paid $300 for a copy of XP for my MacBook Pro...then I get questioned when I do a reinstall? What the fuck is that about?! After all, I thought Windows was all about reinstalling every other day...

I'll stick with my XBox 360 when I need a Microsoft fix. That thing works great...people ought to make computers as easy as game platforms.