Ok I just have to vent here.

I’m doing some tech work fixing this nice woman’s problematic computer. The problem itself is easy to explain – she downloads viruses from Limewire like millions of other people and pays the price. That, and her CD-reader is buggy.

But that’s not the issue I bring you today.

I just spent all bloody day looking for an XP Home OEM disc. The OEM license is stickered to the case, so it’s not as if I’m trying to pirate anything. I’ve never purchased a “Home” version of any OS. It’s like buying a car after someone popped all the tires and fired a gun directly into the engine block. Consequently I didn’t have any XP Home discs on hand. So I decided to consult the internet, and thought to save myself some time, I should look for an image of XP Home with SP3. Easier said than done. Most of the torrents available were for Polish or Italian versions, and the rest were somehow modified which wasn’t what I was going for. But I eventually came across one and downloaded it.

The CD Key which you entered is invalid.

Great.

Then I remembered.  There’s a difference between a Retail license and an OEM one. The keys don’t play well with one another. The problem is, no self-respecting pirate on the internet would want a copy of XP Home, let alone an OEM version. So finding that proved to be the real fun part (read: shoot me). Eventually I did get one, but only after going through a handful of discs (compounded by the problem with the cd reader that I eventually discovered).

I just don’t understand why it seems to be so hard to have just one disc. Fortunately Vista vastly improved upon this by having all tiers layered on a single disc.

I absolutely hate wasting my time on petty issues like this.