Bleeding Edge Technology

When I originally installed Windows Vista on my desktop, it warned me that if I didn't put the license key in at the beginning, I could be hosing myself in a big way and have to re-install. Whatever. I went to try and add a license key yesterday and found that there's a reason it's called a "Release Candidate" and not a full-release. The upgrade functionality didn't quite work as advertised, so I needed to reinstall the whole system. Naturally, I had just gotten the system to a point where it was working beautifully.

Vista has a new feature that allows you to supposedly transfer a machine's profile exactly - including users, software, data, settings - everything - and drop it into a new machine flawlessly. It lets you do this out to external hard drives, over a network over even over the internet. Potentially cool feature. The exporting part worked great, but it crapped out when I went to pull it into the new install. Microsoft's "Solution Finder" came back explaining that the feature just didn't work and that it would work on the full release. Nice solution.

Tags: Windows Vista, License Key, Reinstall