so let me tell you a story windows xp is mostly stable however, if it miscommunicates with your HDD about 3-5 times, it decides to revert to the PIO protocol to communicate with your hdd unfortunately, this is like the oldest protocol in existence and eats about 70% of your cpu in hardware interrupts alone even worse, you cant click the "fuck you windows, put it back" button, and the only way to fix it is to go in device manager and uninstall the offending IDE channel, which only fixes it for about an hour until you have to reboot to make the change permanent, after which it stays fixed for a few days. this is all well and good, until windows fucks up the driver removal, at which point when you reboot it, it never comes back, and you get to watch fun blue screens safe mode is also off limits this happened to me, so i had to go in the filesystem and fix it however, i used windows 7 to fix it, and it changes the file permissions to avoid "file access denied" messages, which is nice, and allows you to actually fix your files however, it is bad because it changes your file permissions (chmod for u unix ppl) so i fixed the windows installation, but since the permissions changed, the windows installation cant reach any of the files in things like windows/system32, and does fun things like asking me to reactivate windows, making none of my user profiles appear anywhere, or creating an account called Owner anyone know anything about this?