Well, last year I applied logic to my curiosity to see just what Windows Vista looked like. Logic and Microsoft have a way of not coexisting so I should have known better. I have a rather robust computer system with multiple hard drives and thought that it would be safe to install a release candidate version of Vista on one of those separate drives in a multi-boot situation. I've never seen problems before with multi-boot setups so I felt it was a rather safe move.

Unfortunately, I didn't use my past experiences with Microshaft as an indicator of just how devious they might be in promoting their new product. The install went very easily and when it finally finished, I found myself with a dual boot startup screen. My first clue as to it being a mistake though was the fact that Vista was the default OS and there seemed to be no way to change that as the XP boot files were no longer in the startup sequence. The Vista drive hijacked the entire boot process. I later found a third party app that would allow me to customize the boot sequence but I don't have good feelings about the software. My Cox security suite thinks files included with the program are a rootkit virus.

Now Vista was very pretty and interesting to go through but I quickly found out that some of my hardware would not be supported such as the network card. Many programs either didn't run or they ran considerably slower including MS Flight Simulator X, a version I was a beta tester for. Supposedly that new program was written to take advantage of the new OS but you'd never know it. A month or so later I found out a release candidate 2 was out and I tried to get it to see if it fixed some of the problems. I didn't get there in time. The demand was so high they closed out access.

So now I'm stuck with an OS I really have no use for and it's not upgradeable until the product is officially released and I'm not going to spend the money on it. Since the Vista drive is the low level boot drive, I can't simply turn off the drive it's on. MS has chosen not to give you any easy way to uninstall it. There's a MS page that tells you to run a command line program for uninstalling but that doesn't seem to work. They then tell you, if it fails, you can always repair your XP OS with the install CD and it will reset the boot back to the XP drive.

Now, I've had to use the repair feature in the past and it always does some damage to the setups of my extensive array of software. I'm really trying to avoid having to reconfigure my computer once again. I have good backups of critical data but just don't want to add a lot of work to my life.

Has anyone gone through something similar to what I've experienced and found an easy way to remove this pest? There has to be a simpler way.

Art