I've been running on linux for several years now. In many ways I'm a big fan. In others, not so much. Well, it recently came to a head that I needed a Windows box on my home network (for a variety of reasons). My wife runs a windows box that is, shall we say, not exactly treated like a favorite pet. Plus, it's her machine and it has a small monitor. I guess I'm too good for a 15 inch monitor now. So finances being what they are, I was put in a real fix: spend as little money as possible to achieve the task of having a windows machine on the network. Long story short, I decided to buy a new Windows XP install disk and in one fell swoop, kill my linux box and my street cred (for what it was worth). A painful decision. If it were less expensive to buy a new windows machine, that's precisely what I would have done. The decision was difficult, but the act should be the easiest thing in the world. Installing Windows on a PC is about as intellectually challenging as making toast. For the record, I make pretty good toast. Of course my friends all lament the decision, and have tried to persuade me not to do it, but I've resigned myself to this direction. Well, as it turns out, I guess they are in a popular camp, as it seems to also have the support of ...Fate or Destiny or the World or God, what have you. I thought it was me versus my own dignity, but I guess I'm battling something altogether bigger. And here, my tale begins (cue music). Friday night, I finished saving off (hopefully) all my important data to my wife's machine, and though it was getting late, I decided I may as well get it started. I knew there would be a bunch of brainless prompts to get through that I would make myself stay up to answer, but whatever. So I put the disk in and reboot. It boots back into linux. Did I miss something? Reboot again. There was a prompt asking me to press any key to boot from CD, and I did, but it still booted to linux. This is definitely an issue to take up tomorrow. Sensibly, I go to bed. Come the morning, I repeat this process a few times while my mind is taking in as many variables as possible to try to determine what could possibly be going wrong. Rebooting linux is slow, or at least it seems slow when you're trying not to see it. Several minutes later, I discover that my keyboard is the problem, or rather its connection. It is a wireless keyboard with a signal receiver with a usb plug. It would seem that usb io wasn't occurring at that phase of the boot sequence. the receiver happens to also have a PS2 option, so I plug that in and viola, it starts to boot from the cd. It doesn't get far, however. It begins evaulating my hardware or something, then the screen is replaced by Line 9816 in the INF file \i386\txtsetup.sif is invalid. Nice. I try it a few more times in the spirit of gambling. Nothing changes. Here's a tip: gamble when the odds are in your favor. So here we are at strike two. I express my frustrations to my wife and she wisely recommends calling Microsoft. It is, after all, a legit product disk. I go to the Microsoft support site and see there are three options

1. Pay $35 for tech support,
2. Use the free online support chat, which at the time happened to have a 45 minute queue, and
3. Free phone support for qualifying customers

I dial the phone support number. Fortunately, a person picks up within a minute. Unfortunately, said person has an accent so thick that I can't discern what she is asking me. I think she is asking if I'd bought a computer with Windows installed on it, or if I'd purchased the disk separately. I tell her that I purchased it separately, but she grows frustrated and repeats her unintelligible question. After three times around, she's getting notably irritated, but I finally realize that what she'd been asking me the whole time was whether I'd bought a computer with Windows installed on it, or if I'd purchased the disk separately. I answer the same way, but using her words (that I had finally managed to piece together). She tells me to read the front of the disk. I do. She tells me (I believe) that because it is a volume license, I am ineligible for free phone support. I have two options, pay $35 for tech support or try the free online chat. Online chat it is. Returning to my wife's computer, I start up IE, since I have no expectation that a chat widget on Microsoft's site would run under FireFox. Maybe it would, but why ask for more beating? I click the link to get in line and it asks me for some information, including the Product ID number. I don't see anything by that label on the disk, so I use the Product Key, but that's a no go. I check their tip for finding the Product ID. Apparently, it's available from Help > About > Foo or something from the Start menu. The problem here is that, you see, I'm unable to install Windows, so that whole Start menu thing? Yeah. I don't have that. So it's off to the site where I bought the disk. Maybe they have support. And maybe it's unavailable on weekends. I recall amidst my trials that I recently discovered that I know a guy that knows a guy that works at Microsoft. I had already asked the guy (not the guy that that guy knows—I don't know him) if he could hook me up with a fresh copy of Office XP on the cheap, and apparenly he could. So rather than seeking any more "support", I'm just going to return the disk and see if I can get a new copy from the other guy. Hell, it'd probably be cheaper anyway. So my linux box is currently enjoying its stay of execution, and I, with my tail firmly between my legs, am going back to borrowing time on my wife's schizophrenic system with the tiny monitor.