When will I learn?

Posted on February 6, 2005 No Comments

I always tell people to skip the upgrade and go with the clean install whenever dealing with Windows. I’ve been saying it for years! “Got an option to upgrade or clean install? Take clean install.” So what did I do? I tried the upgrade… and now I got nuttin.

I have an old NT4 domain controller and file server here. Been around for years and just quietly served it’s purpose. Well, since NT4 support is essentially gone, I figured I should get myself into the Active Directory world and use 2k3. Did some reading at microsoft’s site about moving from NT4 -> Windows 2003 Server and it looked pretty straightforward. So. I. Opted. To. Try. The. Upgrade.

Well bah. I’ll spare you the long version. Suffice it to say a lot of files suddenly couldn’t be found on the CD. Drivers didn’t work. It was ugly. Yeah, I was warned there may be issues (amusingly, warnings I did NOT get when doing this as a clean install) and I ignored the warnings. At my own peril apparently.

So now I’m installing it as a clean install. Hoping like hell to be able to recreate the domain in some way so as not to have to go reconfigure all the client machines. Should be an interesting day.

Update from yesterday: Daughter’s laptop is dead. Alas. The good news is that I was able to recover her data from the hard drive. Still pondering on what to give her next. Looking at picking up a little $20 enclosure to convert her hard drive to a USB2 external drive.

PC Magazine had an article of “Top 15 Firefox Extensions.” If you’re a FF user and an extension junky, worth a look to see if you’re missing anything. Personally, my favorite extension is WeatherFox which has apparently recently been renamed to ForecastFox.

If you’re already using Firefox and Thunderbird, go ahead and have a look at Sunbird next - the calendaring project has a release to play with.

Interesting article (I treated most of it as humor, but I’m sure the author was serious) titled “Why Does Windows Still Suck?” I can pretty much see where he’s coming from some days…

Tags: ActiveDirectory, extensions, firefox, microsoft, sunbird