Tonight was going to be an extremely productive night, or so I thought.

1) I planned to upgrade this blog from dasBlog version 1.6 to 1.8.

2) I planned to install Windows on a new PC, and start using that as my primary machine.

Ah well, 1 out of 2 ain't bad.

The upgrade to dasBlog went fairly smoothly. For some reason my web server's FTP server is extremely flaky, and I lose the connection every few minutes. So upgrading was tedious, but I blame FTP. So here I am on 1.8. I might try a new theme in a few minutes too!

The install of Windows is currently on pause. And I may be screwed - well, I may have to pony up $200 for a new license for Windows. Damn.

OK, here's the story so far. I am currently running an old Pentium 4 1GHz (1.5GB ram 400GB hdd) as my main home machine. Yes, I know - 1 lousy GHz. But I don't do much with it other than Office, Outlook and IE, so it suits my purposes at home.

I have been accumulating parts for a new computer, and finally have it together. An AMD Sempron 2800+ (512MB ram 300GB hdd). I will of course have to buy some more RAM later. But last night I was doing some speed tests, and it turns out the Sempron is 3 times faster than the Pentium 4 I have. So what the hell - I figured I would switch over permanently.

And so here I sit. Having done the Windows install on the new machine. And it's asking for my license key. I have a box full of official Microsoft CD's and keys, so no problem. Or so I thought. I must have 20 official copies of Windows around, and 20 keys, but none of them work. I have keys for XP Home, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Enterprise, Advanced, this, that and everything. But no XP Pro. I have an official CD for XP Pro. But I can't find the license key anywhere.

This is crazy. There should be a better way to manage these keys. They are slips of paper and they can be easily lost. So what can I do? Call Microsoft and say I lost my key, and I would like to transfer my copy of Windows XP to a new system??? Hey... maybe I can do that. It's worth a try at least. Right?