PSA: Save your Win XP serial numbers
PSA: Save your Win XP serial numbers
This has come up twice in my circle of acquaintances in the last few weeks, and apparently it’s not that obvious. If you’re buying a new computer because your old one is slow, boring, spyware-filled, whatever, the new computer you buy is gonna be installed with Windows Vista. We could debate long and hard (but i’ll leave that to the million monkeys on the internet) about whether Vista Is The Future, the reality is Vista is gonna make you want to buy more memory and a faster processor than you’ve been used to. That’s fine if you have a deep wallet, but who does these days? Before you take that old piece of crap and dumpster it (possibly against the law, but we all do it),
BE SURE TO RECORD YOUR OLD WINDOWS XP SERIAL NUMBER
If/when you decide that Vista sucks rocks, you can still fall back to
installing Windows XP on your new computer. Nobody liked XP when it came
out, but if you’re gonna buy into the mainstream of computing so you can
run Office, etc, you will need some kind of Windows. Perhaps
your “recovery disk” won’t let you install XP on the new computer, one
of your nerdy friends most likely has a cd laying around that could be
used to install that “trusty” old XP operating system you’ve learned to
know, love and tolerate. At least two of my friends have
unnecessarily locked themselves into Vista in the last few weeks, and
didn’t get to hear this advice until it was too late. Heck, maybe you
should do this right now. Write it down, send it to yourself in your
gmail account or whatever, but make sure that you don’t lose this bit of
information. In case you don’t know, it’s that little green and white
sticker that has a series of 5 sets of 5 alphanumeric strings like
XPQSJ-KJHOU-IVYUF-FYTUG-GQAZH (this is made up, it won’t work… at least
I doubt it) It could save your weekend.