Eventually My Bootcamp Is Giving Up on Me

Note:
This article was written before I found http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/ which explains uninstalling Office 2007 manually when "add and remove programs" is failing.

Been almost 15 moths now that my macbook was installed in dual boot mode. It was nice. I love it. Bootcamp was such a tough and nice, saviour of my daily life. Until just now, I have to retire it.

My office work is done in WinXP like ASP and VB coding. But yeah, I love web design as well. Therefore I had Adobe Suite like dreamweaver, flash, photoshop, and stuffs. Also I have this Visual Studio installed. Sure I have Ms Office 2007 trial to see how it works. Until then I could not uninstall it. I then checked the details of my installed softwares and I found some could not be uninstalled. Using third party software to uninstall them can be messy, so I won't do it. Leaving scraps of uninstallable software is always bad. That slows your system down. Some people call it Winrot phenomenon. Check Winrot term this website and also this article.

Damn. After I tried to uninstall it a couple of times and no luck, I decided to uninstall the whole WinXP and reinstall it from scratch. Hopefully a clean install.

A friend of mine once said, a bad luck never comes as a single event, it always comes in as a row of bad unlucky events. It happened to me. After those backing-ups and successfull installation, I could not activate my copy of windows. This is a legal copy of windows, so I could not figured out why. So I activated my copy via phone. I was very happy that I could login after that, until later on it asked for another activation after I rebooted the system. The very weird thing was it asked for an activation but as soon as I activated it, it said it was already activated and then kicked me out of the system. Geez, I could not login in any way. Of course I contacted microsoft to rectify this problem and it was solved until I rebooted.

And that's it I've had enough.

Then a light shone on me and a voice said: put it in a virtual machine, use VirtualBox! :-)

I've got it, I tried it and I was happy. Here I am, writing blog thru my WinXP on VirtualBox.