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Happy New Year 2008 to all the readers of my blog (or at least the few of you who have continued to visit/subscribe to my blog, given that I have not been a regular blogger the past couple of months)

Apart from my being kind of overwhelmed at office, one of the reasons for the silence is that my home machine conked out due to defective memory. After the memory was replaced, I found that during that time my Vista install has been corrupted and quite a few services were refusing to start up (including the Network Location service, which means I could not connect to any network). After a day spent searching the internet, I decided, it would be easier to just reinstall the OS. Since I did not want to reinstall all the other software, I decided I would do some kind of a repair install, thus just updating the OS file only.

The problem is, I could not find a way to do a repair install. The Vista Installation DVD just allows me to do a completely new install and the recovery console, just has options to check memory, repair a damaged boot record, do a system/backup restore or go to the command prompt. No OS repair option. I was stumped for quite some time. Then after some research, I found that there was an option on the Vista Installer to Upgrade to Vista and this can be used even if you are launching it from Vista. This option, when you use it from Vista, actually works like an OS Repair. Once that was done, my machine was back to normal like before.

Though it is not easy to find and I could not find too many documentation of this particular use of this feature, it sure worked fine for me. If you get into a similar situation, this post maybe of help. Do note, that after this reinstall, your Vista becomes deactivated and you will have to activate it as soon as you boot up first time. You do not get any grace time to activate. All other software (including Office) already installed seem to retain their activated state.