I’ve got to give Microsoft credit for making all of their software available via download to their MSDN subscribers. I downloaded Windows XP, Office and Visual Studio a few days ago. The only thing they really dropped the ball on is not including a utility in the OS for working with the .iso disk images they distribute.

My new work laptop had Windows XP Home installed on it, so I needed to upgrade it to XP Pro. I downloaded the XP Pro disk image from Microsoft, but couldn’t do anything with it. I tried using this utiltity to burn a CD, but it failed with a ‘General Error’. On advice from a friend, I downloaded the demo of Nero which worked like a charm.

An hour or so later, I have XP Pro installed – I even found the IIS install elsewhere on the CD.

Now if I could only find a way to make the trackpad work like it does on a PowerBook, using this thing would be much more enjoyable.