I Hate Windows Again

I've been trying to install Turbo Tax 2009 for the past 2 hours and still no success. It seems like an easy task... buy Turbo Tax from Costco, open package, insert CD, and install. I've done this for the past 10+ years.

First problem was that my Sony Vaio won't read the CD. That's strange... I was just ripping a DVD-RW from my DVD recorder. After ejecting and reinserting the CD a few times, it obviously wasn't going to work. 5 minutes on Google reveals that the Sony Vaio CR420E with Vista has some type of registry problem under certain conditions which causes the computer not to recognize CDs. What?!

Sigh... okay, download the fix (from 2007), install, and reboot. Woah, all my icons and personal settings are gone AND the CD still won't read. Fortunately, I've had this error before and rebooting bring back all your settings BUT the CD still won't read. At this point, I thought maybe it was a bad CD. Since Turbo Tax ships one CD for Mac and Windows, I stick it in my Mac mini and it reads fine (of course). Hey, I can share the drive and install across the network. 10 minutes later, my Mac DVD drive is mapped to my Sony Vaio but it can only see Mac OS files. Arg!

Since I have a million computers networked at home, I went to my mom's new Dell Inspiron with Windows 7. The CD reads fine but I couldn't connect to the now-shared DVD drive. I had set up my mom's computer without a password and Windows sharing requires a password. More sighing... when I then tried to create a password, Windows 7 Explorer/Control Panel crashed. After restarting and retrying this three times, I gave up on sharing.

Finally, I ended up copying the entire CD (Windows files) to a 4GB USB flash drive on my mom's computer and that seems to work. Of course, the elegant solution was to skip the CD in the first place and download it from Amazon or Intuit. Now all I have to is actually prepare the tax returns. :(

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I tried playing a audio CD-R that works fine in old school CD players and it won't play on my Sony either. I guess the problem is with my Sony.