accidental discovery

so i bought a shiny new dell inspiron 9400 last week, with winodows XP, dvd burner, a gig of ram, a lot of MHz's, about a 60 gig hard disk, 6 USB ports, media shortcuts, 17" hi-def screen, internal modem with WiFi, the works.

i found a great WMP skin, installed photoshop and many of my favorite programs, and transported my music files and photoshop brushes/fonts to the new beast. but when i tried to install windows live messenger, it was not co-operating. i checked firewalls, network connections, ran the disk cleaner about 5 times a day, scanned for viruses and totally debugged the whole system, but still it just would not install. finally, i got frustrated and decided to go back in time.

my desktop computer still operates windows 2000, and i love it to death. it's fast and easy for me, and it's really a great OS. i went online and searched for sites where i could go back to MSN 7.5, thinking perhaps it would work.

eureka! msn 7.5 downloaded, installed and attempted to sign in within 3 minutes of clicking the link to google on my browser. (i'm a firefox groupie, i'll admit).
when it stopped half-way through signing in and told me i had to upgrade to continue, a big part of me wanted to take a hammer to the little silver bastard, but then my wallet started to cry, too. so i just clicked 'OK' and crossed my fingers (and every other appendage, too.)

expecting the installer wizard to tell me yet again that the program had failed to install and to please click here for help, i groaned.

but it worked, and now i have windows live. so, here are step-by-step instuctions to those of you who cannot get windows live to install on your new systems:

1. google the querie 'MSN 7.5'
2. click the link to download300.com
3. click 'download link 1'
4. follow the instructions from there.

TAH-DAH!

yeah. i'm happy to have MSN back, windows messenger is severely lacking.