Windows Vista is yet to be released officially, but if the reviews are to be believed – It’s a worthless piece of crap, esp. for power users. But only time will tell the success story. I’m no rich guy and so will be waiting for a cracked copy to be released before I try it out. My previous experiments with the beta versions & RC1 were not pleasant (partly because of the 30-day trial limit and limited hardware support). The real problem came when I wanted to uninstall it because after 30 days the limited function edition is as good as a bag full of puke.
I basically ran vista on dual-boot with XP and when it came to uninstalling, the only option was to format both my XP and Vista partitions to make sure that none of the buggy code remains behind to irk me in the future (plus I did not know any other alternative method to remove vista :p). As many of XP users should be knowing by now, Windows XP tends to become slower over a period of time, owing to a messed up registry and bloated up unnecessary program installations. I make it a point to format XP every 2 months to keep the performance of the system going.
Naturally with all that formatting, I needed to take backup and it’s one hell of a nightmare to take backup’s of voluminous data amounting to 40GB. But I managed to take all that backup on an extra 120 GB HDD that I found lying around very conveniently (actually it is from my sister’s PC). Being the techno freak that I am, I want my XP installation to be up-to-date with latest updates available from RyanVM’s site. I rely on automated unattended installations to save me the trouble of sitting in front of the PC for 1.5 hrs of the installation time.
This technique worked for me for the last 1 year. But very recently I used the latest untested RC version of Nlite and it somehow messed up with my settings. So I ended up having 3 failed XP installations yesterday and wasted a whole day in that effort. Slept at 2AM!! and the worst part is that I was awakened by dad at 8AM today to pick my sis from airport (whose flight got delayed by 2 hrs due to heavy fog and finally landed at 12 noon). With eyes barely open and a lost REM sleep cycle, I again tried to fix the issue with my installation. Fourth time was lucky for me, I guess – and here I am with a fresh install of XP with a totally uncluttered desktop and a nice green meadow on my screen. It’s almost like I can smell the grass (either that or because I’m madly in love with my GF) on the other side of screen 
This fresh install bought me some good luck too – I got an email from University of Louisville mentioning that I got Admission. Let’s see if it has still some more luck juice left over, which may help with my USMLE exams also.
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