Upgrading Windows

While my laptop was in the shop, my desktop was also being worked on. I was working on upgrading the OS from Windows Home Premium to Windows Professional. You would think the process would be easy, but then again nothing is easy. I had a trial version of Home Premium, and it was about to expire. From what I had been told, and what I read, there should be an issue running the upgrade disk. Turns out I read that wrong. Windows Pro would only upgrade the OS if the previous OS had been an activated Windows OS. This left me with no choice but to upgrade via a "custome install", also known as a "clean" install. What does that mean? Well it just means it wipes my hard drive and installs the OS. However, I did not that Windows made a folder with all my old information in it. The folder was known as "Windows.old". It housed everything from the old OS.    

Thing is, I wanted to restore my games, but I didn't want to have to use the product key
After looking into it more, I found you can't restore games from Windows.old, you can only restore documents and other files. It would have been good if I had taken more of my save game files, not many of them were backed up. I did get the important one, although I did miss Super Meat Boy. Anyway, so after all that I had to go about reinstalling my games, which I am still in the process of doing, and trying to put the save files I did recover back in their proper position. This would allow me to play them again.

There is an underlying lesson that I learned here. Back up! Back up! Back up! NEVER do an OS upgrade with out backing up your files. Yet, you know what they say, you learn from your mistakes. I now know what to do in the future I guess.

~Dave