[geeks] Windows 64-bit insanity

[nate at portents.com]

> A clean slate every so often is needed on most of my computers anyway.

Yes, a clean slate can be helpful, though personally I tend to go the more
perilous route of upgrades at home so that I get more experience and can
solve problems quickly for in-production systems without taking them
offline for clean installs.  I'm personally very happy that I've become
well versed in using sysprep to reseal a Windows OS so I can change
motherboards without having to even do an in-place upgrade of the OS to
rebuild the HAL (do I wish the entire OS was architected better so I
didn't have to do it at all, well sure, but I do have to support the
stupid things...)

But I wasn't even talking about clean restores per se - because when I
went from Mac OS 10.3. to 10.4 and from 10.4 to 10.5, I actually started
with a clean install but then used the Migration Assistant to pull nearly
everything over, which worked great and which I've been very happy with,
and where my point of frustration lies is that the closest thing to this
is in-place upgrades of the OS from Microsoft, or third party tools like
Laplink PCmove, however XP x64 systems can't even explore such options,
they don't exist.  (Microsoft had aquired Apptimum, a company that made an
application transfer utility, updated and renamed it Windows Easy Transfer
Companion beta for Vista, but never released a final version and pulled
all references to it other than an old TechNet article.)

- Nate