Things haven’t gone so well since my last post. At this point XP thinks my soundcard can only support two channels rather than 5.1. I actually thought this was my only problem, which I believed was quite solvable.
Since then, the problems have piled on, in much greater severity. First, before I formatted by C:\ drive, I thought I had backed up all my e-mail from my Interchange\Telus account. After I had burned all messages onto a CD, I browsed through the CD to make sure I could see all the files. I could. Stupidly, I thought that meant the files were safe. When I went to import my message back into the new Outlook on XP, it couldn’t read the messages. I tried the CD on two different CD-ROM drives and they couldn’t read it either. It turns out you can see the files and know how big they are but you actually can’t copy them from the CD. What the hell?!?!?! I can’t tell you how many e-mails I had backed up there. There were a lot of registration e-mails on that CD, things like the id/password combos for my domain registrar. I also had a lot of attachments. That CD was the only place I “backed up” those e-mails. I guess I’d be more choked if they were my erwintang.com e-mails, but still. And here’s the kicker, I had a whole bunch of other crap backed up on that CD, stuff I wouldn’t even think twice about if it was lost forever. Guess what? That reads fine.
If that weren’t enough, I also realized how stupid Microsoft’s requirements are for XP. They state that you need 1.5 Gb of free space to install XP. Yes, that’s true but they neglect to tell you won’t be able to install any programs on it afterwards. I have 50 Gb of space spread over two drives. I installed XP on a 2 Gb C:\ partition thinking 500 Mb would be enough for a swap file. And yes, I know that no matter where I install a program, they do put some files on the C:\ drive. Well, wasn’t it a surprise when after intalling a few program on my D:\ drive, I noticed my C:\ drive was up to 1.9 Gb! That’s total bullcrap. Soon XP started complaining about being low on drive space. I was so mad. I would have deleted a few partitions beforehand to make space if I knew I needed it. Now, with XP already installed, it’s going to be a lot harder to resize and move my partitions. Why doesn’t Microsoft tell you you’re gonna need way more than 1.5 Gb???
It’s going take me a day or two to resize my partition and hopefully things will be better. Did you know that Partition Magic 8 costs $100 at Future Shop?