For what is now a full week, I have been rebuilding my system after XP refused to act right. I cannot believe how much crap that I have accumulated over the years. I had made sure ever since XP came out, that I kept much of my preferences and software setup. only updating things as I could afford to...

So a few weeks ago, XP just decided it wasn't going to boot anymore. Usually when that happened, because I am dual booting with Windows 7, a quick trip to the boot.ini or BCDedit usually took care of it. But this time no configuration or fix would satisfy XP - it just would not boot. I have always been preferential to XP, even now I am highly upset that I don't have it - but what can you do?

Fortunately, I still had WIndows 7 on the other disk, so I had to put my whole XP installation in a folder and install WIndows 7 on the primary drive. So I am now dual booting WIndows 7 with Windows 7...

I started slowly setting things back up, and since I still had the Windows XP files I at least could recover my favorites, program preferences and most importantly, my game saves!

Regular programs are easy, just reinstall them. But what has had me sweating for the last week is re-installing games and retaining the saves - here is the process: (thank God that I have most of ny games on another drive instead of the Program FIles folder!)

1) Rename the original game.

2) Install the game to the same place as the original.

3) Copy (not move, in case something goes wrong) saves, profiles to the new installation.

4) Test the game to make sure everything is intact.

5) After everything checks out, erase the original game. Have to remember to use "Shift+Delete" or else Windows 7 will take FOREVER to recycle a game. That isn't based on size, but rather how many files, as it is indexing each file as it is moving it into the recycle bin - so a 1 meg folder with 100 files can take longer to recycle than an 8 gig folder with 10 files. Boy, I miss XP already...

Part three is the rough part - I have to track down the save file, which each game has it's own "special place" to place it. Some are in Documents and Settings/.../My Documents; others are in ...My Documents/My Games; still others are in the Public folder; and then there is the Local/Application folder, the Program Files folder, and the game folder itself. Each game has it's save in any one of those locations... and I had a LOT of games! The bigest problem is not only do you have to find the saves, then you have to match them up to the right place in Windows 7's totally different system.

So I have been spending the whole week doing these games, and as of today I have about 10 games left. I get through about 3-4 games per day if I am lucky - and that's doing nothing BUT installing the games. To put it in perspective, I have games going back to the last year of Windows 98, like Nightmare Creatures (I didn't install that but that's an example) , Empire Earth 1, Shadow Warrior (wouldn't it be nice to have a new Shadow Warrior?). They span all the way up to today's games, not to mention little stuff like Slingo, Reflective Arcade / Big FIsh / Oberon games like Riccochet and Hidden Object games I collected during the years.

One of the worst games I had to re-install was Call of Duty 5: World at War. That sucker has like 7 updates, and Activision never made an inclusive one, so you have to download all of them and step through them one by one until you get to the latest, that took me almost all day, including the other steps.

And Games for Windows places a whole new monkey in the gearbox. It also has a separate game save system, and the Games for Windows Live folder has several places it could be as well. And don't have games from the older GFWL, because there is more hunting. And then you have to place these in the new area in Windows 7's User folder, because it's set up different than the Documents and Settings folder from XP! But once you find it the game will pick it up. Games from GFWL were the only ones I had trouble with recognizing the save file. I had to also go through the rigamoro of making an offline profile that matched the one I had in XP - but even after that there are some games that I had to start over again. Gears of War, for example, recognized my profile but all my cogs are gone and it will only let me start at chapter 5 or 1. Basically that means I have to start over. Stupid if you ask me.

So I'm going to get back to this madness, and after this is over I get to put plugins in Photoshop - which is just as testing. The last time I had to re-install Photoshop I didn't even put someof those plugins back - because some of them took 40 - 60 minutes to install (try the Dreamsuite plugins). Those Dreamsutie plugins are the worst, they scan your whole life before they finish; I have to leave and do something else - like go shopping before they finish, and there's no way to stop it!

OK, I've said my peace and ranted my rant... back to the salt mine.