Here's the situation: Right now I'm dualbooting the Windows 7 release candidate (build 7100) and Windows XP.

About 5 days ago, Windows XP decided to be troublesome and for no apparent reason, the "system" process took up exactly 81,004 K of memory in addition to rendering my computer barely usable, freezing when even opening the quick launch for example. Restarting/doing a system restore does nothing. It's permanent.

That leaves me with the W7 RC to use exclusively, given that XP is basically useless. I'm pretty much gonna have to reinstall it, but that's troublesome because I need to back up a shitload of media and important stuff and I basically feel like going down and buying a new 1TB hard drive or something rather than have to selectively back things up.

But then, while I'm using the RC in the midst of figuring out what to do about XP, W7 claims that the software I'm using isn't genuine and disables automatic updates among other things. This is beyond idiotic, because I'm using the freaking RC with a serial number provided to me by Microsoft themselves from their website. How can the RC not be "genuine"? Ugggh.

So I'm stuck with two crippled OS', one arguably less so than the other. Just now I tried reinstalling the drivers for my scanner, but lo and behold, they don't work for W7. Which means if I want to scan things I'm going to have to wait a year and hope XP doesn't freeze.

God damn it, Microsoft.