Murphy hates me, this I know...

...because glitches tell me so.

As you may recall, I've been trying to pin down which of My stock of DIMMs are causing problems.

This has resulted in a lot of changes of memory installed. add in a hard drive that sometimes doesn't get recognized on boot, and I've had a lot of changes.

So, today windows proceeds to tell me that I've had too many hardware changes and need to re-activate windows.

Now, when you get this, you have a choice of going thru the activation process or getting logged out. Those are the *only* options.

There's an activate online option. But, since Windows hasn't yet loaded the network drivers, this doesn't work.

So you get to go thru a phone activation process. Apparently, if you have a smart phone there are some shortcuts... I don't, so I had to do it the hard way.

First off you have to read the "product key" that the activation program on the computer has generated. This is a bunch of 6 and 7 digit number groups.

On the plus side, they actually have decent voice recognition, so it usually understands you when you read them to it.

Once you've read this insanely long set of numbers, you get to enter *7* sets of 6 digit numbers. Thankfully it reads them one group at a time (they are identified as groups A thru G) and you can ask for repeats.

Once you've entered those into the computer, It tells you you should write them down because you can use them in the future to avoid this process.

It gives you all of 10 seconds (or less) to do this. So I had to keep saying "give me a minute" (the code phrase for I need more time).

As you can imagine it takes quite a bit more than 10 seconds to write down those 7 6-digit numbers and make sure you have them right. So this is *very* annoying.

Yay! it activated. At which point things weren't working right.

After some digging, it seemed that Network Connections and Device Manager both showed *nothing* present.

I spent several hours trying various solutions. Loads of fun that. Look something up on the other computer, use the KVM switch to switch back to this one, do a step or two, switch back for more of the steps...

Alas, I couldn't print the steps because my printer was out of toner for one color. It's useless until the new cartridge gets her (Fortunately Doug was wiliing to give me credit, so I can pay for it as part of my monthly payments to him)

What finally fixed it was digging out the XP Pro CD and using it to "repair" the installation. That took an hour or so. And then I had to reinstall Service Pack 3. And a bunch of updates.

Of course, somewhere in all this my firewall program quit working. That took several more resets as I uninstalled it and reinstalled it.

still got get Windows Update working. Seems my attempt to install IE8 didn't work right. *sigh*

I'll just wait till the monthly updates and if they don't take, I'll downgrade back to 7 or even six, and try to get the upgrades to go from there.

(later)

Oh, I forgot to mention that after I repaired the Windows install, I had to authorize all over again. For different set of numbers... arrrgggghhhh...