Mirror Magazine - TPH: Licensed?

Thank you for a very encouraging response towards TPH. However, we apologise for our inability to reply each question on a personal level, due to the countless number of emails we get every week. We are doing our best to address the major issues raised. Computers are complex machines and therefore it is sometimes difficult for us to provide solutions to specific software or hardware issues in a specific computer system. We will do our best to provide valid advice to your queries to the best of our ability.

The real thing
Dear TPH,
Please enlighten me on how to install a user-licensed copy of Windows XP on a computer, already operating on a counterfeit copy of Windows. Do I have to format the full disc? If it is only the drive containing the OS that should be formatted, is it possible to transfer the other programs?
- A. P.

Dear A. P.,
I believe you are already enlightened enough, because you have chosen to donate a considerable amount of your hard-earned money to the richest man on Earth. If not you will be ‘enlightened’ by merit of the fact that your money may well end up being spent on building a well in a village in sub-Saharan Africa or an orphanage in India by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. I reckon my job is to ‘enlighten’ you on how absolutely simple, the task of installing an OS on your computer is. At least I will spare you the trauma, pain and the loss of my life’s worth of important documents that I endured in the process of learning how to install pirated beta versions of partially-cracked licensed software through trial and error!

Most computers nowadays are designed to be able to run on multiple Operating Systems (OS). What this means is that you can have more than one OS installed in your computer provided that,

1. You can run on only one OS at a given time. You have to select the OS when the computer boots up, and restart the computer if you wish to change the environment.

2. Each OS must have its own partition on your hard-drive. Two sets of OS system files in the same partition cannot co-exist peacefully. There are Operating Systems and system disks that, on the other hand, can boot up a computer from a removable drive such as a CD-ROM or floppy drive. They do not require to be installed on the hard drive.

3. The applications (such as Photoshop, MS Office…) that you install under a particular OS are usually not interoperable between different platforms, even on the same machine.

Some operating systems such as older versions of Windows and Linux can only be installed only on the first partition (usually known as the C: drive even though the drive letter may not always be indicative of the drive sequence). Windows XP, however, can be installed in any partition. If you choose to ‘Upgrade’ your operating system in the same drive, you will be able to retain the applications you have installed under the previous OS. If you choose to install the new OS afresh, then even though the ‘Program Files’ folder and its contents will remain intact, the OS won’t recognise them as programs (updating individual system registry keys is time consuming, and takes a higher level of expertise), and therefore you will have to install the applications all over again.