Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”    - Jack London After doing quite a bit of reading to check up on various potential issues regarding the installation of the Windows 7 public Beta (build 7000),  and after having run it for a bit inside a VM,I decided it would be OK to do an upgrade over my notebook’s Windows Vista Ultimate installation. I use this machine often, but it is not my primary development box, so if things went south, it wouldn’t hurt me too much. The upgrade process was interrupted the first and second times by “incompatible software”. The first was Windows Powershell – which is installed by SQL Server 2008. There is no obvious way to uninstall this, so what I did was to rename the powershell folder under the Windows\System32 folder, and then search for the registry entries and set the installed key from “1” to “0”. That took care of the first offender. The next interruption came when Windows 7 told me Raxco Perf...

Here is an interesting experience. I don't know how this happened, but either through my careless deletion of an errant Registry key, or some other demon in the OS, I lost the COM+ subsystem when I rebooted Vista. This means you get errors like "Not enough storage space" and so on. Windows Restore is grayed-out, and all kinds of other goodness. Not only that, but the system won't recognize the Windows Vista DVD in the drive since it now thinks it's a blank CD. DOH! Unlike with previous OS versions, you cannot repair Windows Vista from the Boot CD unless there is either a System Restore point or you've backed up the system to another drive or other acceptable media. Since I had no backup and could not see "System Restore" I was sunk, right? That would leave only the option of a fresh install which would rename my old Windows folder to windows.old or something like that. Then, if I wanted my software, I'd have to boot into another OS (I've got ...