Hi DanR--
1) If you install XP after Vista has been installed and want to set up a
dual boot, I didn't say it can't happen; I said it will happen successfully
a small percent of the time and the literature on dual boot is replete with
the caveat to install the older OS first. I offered an MSKB for when there
are problems because Vista was installed first.
What you know for sure is you got lucky with an XP install second; but in
100 tries you would find very few successes. My method as to installs of
OS's to set up a dual boot is to install the older one first, but most
people subscribe to it. In a thousand tries in a lab environment a recovery
CD will not equal XP nor will a recovery DVD equal Vista almost every time.
"If the OP uses the Vista restore disk to put Vista on his computer (factory
fresh) he will have a normal computer running Vista just like he would have
if he had the retail Vista DVD."
I know this won't happen above 90% of the time if ever. I think you mean
Vista Boot Pro not Vista Pro Boot. I have been aware of it wsince the early
days of the Vista Beta and recommended it more times than I can count when
it's appropriate. I don't think it will help the OP working with a
recovery DVD.
***How MSFT Greed Prevents Millions Of End Users From Having a Vista DVD
When They Buy A New Computer***
First of all there are approximately 300 Named OEM partners. The reason
that restore or recovery discs exist at all is pure Greed on the part of
MSFT and the OEMs. MSFT forces this despite all the BS from the MSFT
lackeys that abound--and besides selected bloggers who have been bribed with
laptops and other expensive hardware goodies to support MSFT in the last
year--yes girls and boys MSFT pays bribes to so-called objective bloggers to
shill for them in the form of free computers and software.
Dell is the one exception. When the OEM division of MSFT led by Accountant
(not trained in computer engineering) Scott Di Valerio who is VP for OEM)
sets up contracts with the 300 OEM named partners MSFT demands and
stipuolates that they will not ship a Vista DVD. What happens then is a
code short crap substitute gets shipped and is called a recovery disc (or
you called it a restore disc). It is not Vista and in the realm of XP it is
not XP. It does not have all the Vista code. And most importantly
statistically it works a small percent of the time. That's why a repair
install is a very important tool in XP, and since Win RE does not work much
of the time it remains an important tool in Vista. Tio do one, you can't
use a recovery disc. You must have a Vista DVD--and that goes for Win RE's
tools as well unless your enterprise has a setup with MSFT for a way to
pre-install Win Re. Win RE can also be pre-installed by the end
user--however they need a genuine Vista DVD to do that.
Di Valerio doesn't care if MSFT customers can recover with a recovery
DVD--he wants to force them to buy a retail Vista. The setup engineers at
MSFT haven't had the balls to stand up to the sales arm even though they
know well that without a Vista DVD the customer has no access to most of
their recovery tools including Win RE and a repair install.
CH
I'd like to give a big shout out to the West Wing who is far and away the
most successful killing machine in the history of the U.S. The same amount
of kids die in an American uniform every week that died at Virginia Tech.
More than that number of Iraquis die every day since the US bumbled in like
a retarded bull in a China shop.
FRANK RICH: *Iraq Is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac* New York Times Sunday 4/22/07
PRESIDENT BUSH has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He
took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week
he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from
Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s
end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a
selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is
politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he’ll take six weeks to show
his face — and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday
papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare
opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose
suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.
But he couldn’t inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his
post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his
predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq,
is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington
when the empty hope of the “surge†was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad
civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg’s. McClatchy
Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past
six months was at its all-time high for this war.
At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer’s metastasis — the
twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both
men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general
has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his
involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught
the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately
dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony
(a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than
Condoleezza Rice.
Yet each man’s latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors
next to their roles in the Iraq war. What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar
is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the
current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that
led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having
slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having
trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web
of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard
potpourri of individual blunders.
Mr. Gonzales’s politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle
next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the
administration’s legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for
Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America’s image and gave terrorists a
moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn’t end
there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago,
The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales’s reckless role in vetting the
nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December
2004.
Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post
after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked
any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a
supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single,
nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik’s longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The
president’s spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the
White House had had “no reason to believe†that Mr. Kerik lied during his
vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been
rushed.
THANKS to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr.
McClellan’s spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and
Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed
rushed — by Mr. Gonzales — and the administration had every reason to
believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales
was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing
to “questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of
mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption,†not to mention a
“friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime.†Yet Mr.
Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job
of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000
employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.
Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most inopportune time for
the Giuliani presidential campaign. But it’s as a paradigm of the Bush White
House’s waging of the Iraq war that the Kerik case is most telling. The
crucial point to remember is this: Even had there been no alleged
improprieties in the former police chief’s New York résumé, there still
would have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any
administration job.
The year before Mr. Kerik’s nomination to the cabinet, he was dispatched by
the president to take charge of training the Iraqi police — and completely
failed at that mission. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable
chronicle of Green Zone shenanigans, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,â€
Mr. Kerik slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival
and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile. Rather than
train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque appraisals of the
dandy shopping in Baghdad’s markets.
Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force instead of
hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian death squads, there might
not now be extended tours for American troops in an open-ended escalation of
the war. But in the White House’s priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor
third to cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik’s P.R. usefulness as a
symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an administration that has
exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq
invasion) and tacky (in 2004 campaign ads).
Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had commandeered an
apartment assigned to ground zero police and rescue workers to carry out his
extramarital tryst with the publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr.
Wolfowitz’s scandal is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the
judgment of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha
Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported, he also
helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high at the Pentagon in
2003. No one seems to know what she actually accomplished there, but the
bill was paid by a Defense Department contractor that has since come under
official scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance. So
it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.
You don’t have to be a cynic to ask if the White House’s practice of
bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war might be a form of hush
money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the World Bank despite a Pentagon
record that included (in part) his prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about
W.M.D. and a nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world
that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his public
humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared tell Congress
(correctly) that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure
Iraq after the invasion. Once the war began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national
security to bar businesses from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from
competing for major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous
monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected companies, including
the one that employed Ms. Riza.
Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been
betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different
ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House
connects and contaminates all its organs. It’s no surprise that one United
States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice
Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with
administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz
to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job
for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of
the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this
sleazy couldn’t possibly win a war.
Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece
of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into
Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and
Congress steps up its confrontation over the war’s endgame, our desperate
president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11
incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it’s clear that he’s
the one with reason to be afraid.
