r3dux.org

This has to be the most impractical yet wonderful sofa in the world… Objet d’art incarnate.

This is a bit of a rant, and everything you need to know is in the title alone… but it’s also an accurate account of my experience of trying to give a company money – so should you wish to avoid this particular trap (and gloat that you hopefully haven’t fallen into it), then please, peruse my tale of woe and heed the warning well!

Points Mean Prizes

Xbox 360 points are used to buy games, add-ons, and extra gubbins which you can download right away via the Xbox Marketplace (kind of like the Android Market or iTunes App Store). You can’t just pay cash on your credit card (except, I think, for outright purchased retail Xbox 360 games which you can DL to your hard drive), instead you have to spend real money buying points and then spend those points on actual games/content/digital film rentals or whatever.

The entire system is a bit meh.

Spot the blatent lie... (image links to source)

Anyways, my Xbox gamer account (OpenR3dux) was created in the UK, and I wanted to pick up some points the other day so I could buy the Resident Evil 5 Untold Stories bundle, and the Shetboy and I could get our zombie whuppin’ on. So, I go along to a local electronics/games/music store and pick up a 1500 point card for $27AUD, which is more than I need as the expansion is only 960 points (but it’s not like you can buy 960 points). Ho-hum – 1500 points it is…

Consumer Consumed

I get a card, head home, peel off the back strip to get my 25 digit point-redemption code, enter it into the 360, and it tells me to get stuffed: Invalid code.

I try to redeem the code online through the web interface, and it tells me to sling my hook again: Invalid code.

I call Xbox technical support and fight my way through a bewildering array of options (is this a support query? or maybe an account query?), they make me listen to five minutes of spiel unrelated to anything I want assistance with, and then drop my call.

I call Xbox technical support again, go through the options, and finally manage to get through to a customer representative in India (or at least with an Indian accent) called “John”. English is not John’s first language, and I have to spell out my entire name, address and postcode phonetically A for Alpha, B for Bravo style…

I then have to provide my 25 digit redemption code phonetically. Twice. Because John is a bit mutton and stuffs it up the first time even though we’re crawling through the details at a glacial pace in my best BBC voice. Finally, John manages to identify the problem: As those with keen eyes might have already spotted in the title – Microsoft Xbox 360 points are region specific.

I can’t take the points card back to the shop because its opened, and I doubt they’d believe me when I say I haven’t redeemed the code, so I get riffing with John about how we can resolve this issue:

- You can see that the code is valid, just not for this region, so can you invalidate this code (i.e. set it redeemed), and you credit me 1500 Microsoft points?
- No.

- Can you invalidate this code and give me a new UK code which I can actually use?
- No.

- Is there anything you can do?
- I recommend that you create a new, Australian GamerCard/account and use the points with that.

WTF?! Part of the fun of having a GamerCard is that when you play games and do certain things you get achievements, which then contribute to your GamerScore, and while this bears no correlation to your penis size, IQ or your skill as a gamer – it does give some indication and record of what you’ve played and what you’ve managed to achieve in terms of game progress. I’m not creating a new account, and that’s all there is to it.

The Workaround

The (still unredeemed) card will go in a box to be used for Christmas presents (but only for people with AU region GamerCards), and I will not be buying Xbox points cards again: Instead, I had to buy the points directly through the Xbox on my credit card and that went through instantly with no issues. Which is what I should have done in the first place.

The problem with a post like this is that no-one will ever find it until it’s too late, and by this stage they too have gone through the automated voice-message wrangler and spelt out every letter of every word and code to a disinterested and underpaid help rep as well.

S for Sierra, U for Uniform, C for Charlie, K for Kilo, S for Sierra…

Backstory

I’d had enough of fighting with OpenOffice 3.2 today and finally cracked: I bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic edition for $49AUD through Microsoft’s It’s Not Cheating program.

However, since I run Linux I thought I’d just get a copy of CrossOver and I’d be laughing, but this was not to be. I ponied up for Office, set it downloading, then went to get CrossOver only to find it only supports up to Office 2007 – and I don’t mean that Office 2010 won’t work 100%, or will be a little eratic – it won’t work at all. Feck!

Okay, so I can always run it through virtualisation (i.e. a VirtualBox or VMWare instance running some variety of Windows), but I didn’t fancy running the latest, greatest Office on a shonky old copy of XP, so I ponied up (again) for a copy of Windows 7 64-Bit Upgrade (that’s another $49AUD through It’s Not Cheating) and created a new virtual machine, installed Windows 7, entered the key at the end of the install, and it told me it wasn’t valid! Double feck!

At this point I’m $150AUD out of pocket with nothing to show for it, and am starting to furrow my brow.

Trying to deal with the key issue later – I just left the key out to get 7 up and running (it’ll go for 30 days without activation) and tried the key again from within the OS rather than from the installer; this time instead of just key invalid I got an error message stating that this key is not valid for a clean install of Windows… Okay.. now we’re getting somewhere – let’s fix this bad boy.

The Fix

There’s a bunch of stuff on the Web about forcing Windows 7 to accept a clean install from an upgrade disc by creating registry keys, running arcane commands (slmgr -rearm etc.), removing config files from the ISO before install etc. – and to be perfectly honest I didn’t fancy re-installing so I had a quick whirl at all of ‘em. And guess what? They didn’t work, so I’m not going to post them here. Instead I’ll tell you what worked for me [drumroll please....]:

Installing another version of Windows first.

No, really.

It doesn’t have to be 64-bit if you’re migrating 32-bit to 64, it doesn’t have to be one step below Windows 7 (i.e. Vista), it doesn’t even have to be a legal, valid version of Windows! It just has to be some incarnation of Bill’s Marvelous Blue-Screen Machine, and then when you install Windows 7 on top of the existing install, it’ll recognise a prior version of Windows existed, and your “upgrade” key will work perfectly.

Ba-da-bing Ba-da-BOOM! Shamone! =P

So in my case, this just meant slapping a copy of XP onto a new virtual machine, then the instant that’s finished installing, just changing over the ISO image mounted on the virtual DVD drive from XP to 7, rebooting, and letting this second version of Windows install.

Once you’ve got Windows 7 up and running, your “old” copy of windows will be sitting in C:\Windows.old, and you can either use the built-in Disk Cleanup tool to remove it or just delete that folder and you’re as good as new*.

* = If you’re doing a native Windows 7 install, once you’ve removed the old install then you’re quite literally good as new. If you’re installing on a virtual box using a hard drive which uses dynamic storage (i.e. you allocate, say, 60GB for the HD, but it doesn’t take up any space to begin with, it only takes up space when data is added to the drive) then the space allocated for the old Windows install can’t be fully recovered because dynamic disks can take up more space, but do not resize back down to take up less space when you remove data! But you’re going to put more than 700MB of additional stuff on it anyway, right? So just remove the old Windows install before installing new apps and the like and you’ll break even!

It’s not a glamorous hack or sneaky workaround, but it does work, and who doesn’t have an old copy of Windows sitting around somewhere? If you’re feeling particularly cheeky you could try it with a copy of Windows 3.1 or 95 installed and see if it still upgrades clean

Cheers!