This weekend, I had planned to finish off a lot of work that’s been pending for quite a bit now. Yes, work. On a weekend. You know, the kind of stuff that requires a set amount of concentrated amount of time and effort that never actually gets done during the week because you’re too busy doing the stuff that your daily work routine dictates. Contact Client X, draft document Y, get project Z completed, that sort of thing. So, I decided to take some time off on the weekend and finish off moving my site to our Amieo portal framework. While this is usually pretty much a trivial task (I could have simply handed it over to the Amieo implementation team), I planned to develop a couple (or so) modules for some custom functionality that I wanted to have on my site, at home, in the (relative) peace and quiet. I’ve always been the “Be Prepared” types, so I took a backup of my current site, an Amieo deployment, all the dev tools I needed (and some I didn’t 
) and got it all home on my way back on Friday.
This weekend, I had planned to finish off a lot of work that’s been pending for quite a bit now. Yes, work. On a weekend. You know, the kind of stuff that requires a set amount of concentrated amount of time and effort that never actually gets done during the week because you’re too busy doing the stuff that your daily work routine dictates. Contact Client X, draft document Y, get project Z completed, that sort of thing. So, I decided to take some time off on the weekend and finish off moving my site to our Amieo portal framework. While this is usually pretty much a trivial task (I could have simply handed it over to the Amieo implementation team), I planned to develop a couple (or so) modules for some custom functionality that I wanted to have on my site, at home, in the (relative) peace and quiet. I’ve always been the “Be Prepared” types, so I took a backup of my current site, an Amieo deployment, all the dev tools I needed (and some I didn’t ) and got it all home on my way back on Friday.
My home box is pretty much an entertainment / general file storage machine so setting up the development environment would require quite an effort. I decided to finish off all the required installations on Friday night itself, so I could start off fresh on Saturday morning, bright and early.
First things first, even before I began to install Visual Studio.Net, I would need to have my IIS up and running so that VS.Net’s ASP.Net components would install properly. So I proceeded to install IIS from my Windows XP Add / Remove Windows components control panel. I did the required checking and un-checking in the add components dialog and pressed Finish. As expected, it required me to insert my Windows XP Pro installation disk, which I did. To my surprise, the installer refused to recognise the CD, saying that it required staxmem.dll which was definitely present on the CD, but the installer kept saying that it
didn’t! Thinking that the installer probably needed files from the Windows XP Service Pack 2 installation, (my CD is a vanilla XP installer), I extracted Windows XP SP 2 onto a folder and pointed the installer to the required file, fully expecting it to pick up the file from there and continue the install. To my further surprise, even this failed, that too with the same error. Fine. Now, I was frustrated. I punched in the error message into Google and landed up on this page. Wokay. So it seemed to be a “known issue”. Fair enough, I ran the cryptic command line “esentutl” command and found out the problem was not there. Next step: Create an integrated Windows XP SP2 install image. Following the procedure to the letter, I did just that and now had a supposed “integrated” Windows XP install folder. Yay. Right, back to the IIS installer, I pointed it to the required file in the new, integrated, folder. Nope, no dice. It continued to give the same error. Aaargh! 
+ 
Running out of options at 3:30 am on a Friday night can be pretty painful to most people, I was pretty much in a hair pulling frenzy by then. I decided to call it a night and look at the problem in the morning and save my remaining hair from imminent destruction by my own two hands.
Friday morning, I slaved at my computer all day, attempting all sorts of things to get IIS to install on my
non-cooperative machine. But it was not meant to be. I had come to realize that there were only two solutions to this problem.
Solution 1: Give it up and reinstall Windows XP from scratch, this time taking care to install IIS before installing the accursed (but much required) Service Pack 2.
Solution 2: Give it up still further and get a “pre-integrated” installer of Windows XP pro with Service Pack 2 built into it and install Windows XP from scratch.
Both would require me to totally nuke my current software setup and redo everything, including months of setting up of various software that was installed in bits and pieces. While I have done this sort of thing before, like setting up a complete new installation at just a whim in a matter of half a day including all critical software, there was no way that I was going to do this over the weekend. No waaaay.
Because I had a Plan B. 
Organisation. If you’ve had a computer as long as I’ve had and have collected as much files as I have (ha!) then I can bet you anything you want that your files are disorganised. And though I do perform maintenance every once in a while (read: Once in a blue moon! ), my spanned volume was pretty much a mess. I decided to take this even-more-long-pending task up and finish organising my stuff.
So there you have it. I now have a much cleaner, leaner storage facility.
I’ve organised my videos, collecting them all under a centralised folder and eliminated. I’ve organised all
my music. Yes, I finally did it! I deleted all the random stuff that was present in my semi – sorted folders; keeping only that which was at least mildly interesting.
Next up: I’m going to check out all the desktop search engines, namely, Google, Yahoo, MSN and maybe even Coppernic and X1. I want to be able to search my stuff, fast.
I’ll keep you posted on which one I finally select. Keep watchin’. 
Posted while listening to Poe - Hey Pretty (Drive Remix)
