Windows 7 is due to be released soon: On the 22nd October 2009 to be exact. On and after that date I foresee many people buying new pre-built computers with Windows 7 installed on them. Why do I pre-empt this happening? The reason is that many people didn’t rush out to buy Vista after it was released to manufacturing (RTM) simply because it sucked at first, and has taken almost until its successor is released to get working at least something like it should with the release of 2 Service Packs. – This means that a lot more people are still running XP rather than Vista. My blog’s visitor statistics bear this out, and they indicate that approximately four times more of my readers are still running XP compared to those running Vista. XP will run on pretty much any hardware available new or secondhand today. Vista, and more importantly Windows 7, will only run on hardware designed to run Vista and 7.

- This means that a large number of Windows users are probably still running old equipment, designed in the pre-Vista era.

<nag time> I know for a fact that some Windows users are still running equipment built in the Win 9x era, pre-XP, with the original copy of Win 9x operating system still in use too. – Well those people deserve everything they get: Their system will always be slow, but more importantly it will always be improperly patched against critical threats. As a result it will be infested with malware and taken over by criminals using botnets to run DDOS attacks, relay and generate spam, and relay illegal porn, among other things. If the legal authorities discover that they’re doing this and throw the book at them then I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for them. </nag time>

Those Windows users running fully-patched XP operating systems on old hardware are going to be needing new computers rather soon I would imagine, as their old hardware must be showing signs of age by now; and a new machine with Windows 7 preinstalled would be just the thing for them. – So as soon as 7 is released they’ll be in the stores buying brand new shiny computers.

I’m sure that many of those people will still run XP in addition to Windows 7, even on a new machine; whether it be in a VM environment inside windows 7 itself, or as a dual-boot on their new computers. – Good for them: I intend to do just that myself on the machine that I built for Windows 7 use, which currently is running the Win 7 64-bit Release Candidate, up until 2014 – when the XP Support Lifecycle ends and no further security patches are issued for XP. – I’ll then remove it from my machines totally: I don’t want to become an online security-risk to myself and others.

(I was rather chuffed the other day when the O.S. used up over 7 of the 8GB of RAM I’d fitted, while transferring over 30GB of files across my home network. – I knew that there was a point to installing all that memory somewhere. )

If you’re one of those people who are buying a new machine with Windows 7 pre-installed, then ensure that you get an accompanying Windows 7 installation DVD from the retailer; even if it costs extra, (Although it shouldn’t.) because you are definitely going to need it some day; and if you can’t get to it or an image of it, then you could find yourself screwed, big time. make sure that the copy of the pre-installed operating system has the same key-code as the preinstalled operating system: If it hasn’t then it’s not a proper copy.

Why am I writing about this in particular?

When XP was RTM’d, a lot of manufacturers took the shortcut of not including installation CD media with their computers sold with XP preinstalled, in order to save on costs. This was all very well; but it left many people in a strange predicament when their operating system or other software asked for the Windows installation CD and there wasn’t one. I myself bought a cheap computer with an Intel Celeron in the days before I built my own, and discovered that there was no Windows CD packaged with it when I got it home and had used it a while: Just a manufacturer’s CD with a ghost-copy of the drive as it was when it was sold to me.

How did I get round that?

The manufacturer and the retailer were no help whatsoever; yet I needed the CD as I needed to do a format and reinstall, as the operating system had become corrupt and crashed, and I had a buyer for the machine after putting it up for sale locally.

What did I do? I booted with a Linux distro and found the CD image on the hard-drive, copied it to CD, and reinstalled from that.

I looked for a folder containing 2 particular files; one of which was winnt.exe; the DOS setup file, and winnt32.exe; the protected mode setup file. – Both of which were needed to do the full reinstall after the reformat. It had some coded name rather than a name plainly stating that it was the CD image file. – In fact not even the manufacturer’s helpdesk nor the retailer knew that it was there on the disc! – How’s that for useless?!

This was an less usual case, however; in that I needed to do a full reinstall, and luckily the entire CD image had been copied to disk in this case. It isn’t always though. – So what do you do, having no XP CD, when Windows or another program asks for it?

You tell it to look in the largest of the directories called “i386”: When it asks you to insert your CD; just press the OK button. It’ll fail; but the next dialog should ask you to tell the computer the location of the installation CD. Instead of telling it the location of the CD, because there isn’t a location for the CD; (The CD doesn’t exist as far as you know.) you point it towards the largest i386 directory.

There’s a bonus: The bonus is that Windows remembers the location of the files. The next time a program wants to look at the installation media, Windows will look in i386 first. – Sweet!

A good idea is to copy your installation CD to your hard-drive. The first time that a program asks for the installation CD; just point it at the copied image: Point it to the i386 folder in the copied image if it wants to be pedantic. That way you’ll not have to worry about having your installation CD to hand again.

- That’s Windows XP: What do you do if the operating system in question is Windows 7?

Well; you’ll find out in part 2. – Coming soon.

(Yes; I will write it before 22nd October 2009.)