After procrastinating for a month, I finally broke down and installed TurboTax this weekend. Except that I didn’t have enough disk space to install the 500 MB application on my Quicken Virtual PC. Time to clean up some disk space.
I’m really big on Virtual PC and keep my personal and business expenses running and backed up on virtual computers that I run on my pristine copies of Windows 2000 Pro.
The virtual drives are kept small to fit on a 4g DVD which makes backup of the entire system as simple as burning a new DVD. Before making drastic changes, I always create a copy of the file containing the virtual drive image in case something goes wrong.
Of course it did.
I ran the disk cleanup utility and all the unused files, old system upgrades were compressed or deleted leaving with 1GB of free space. Plenty of space to install TurboTax.
Apparently .NET needed to be installed taking up 200 MB with the usual reboot. Somehow pci.sys was corrupted in the intall or the disk cleanup utility messed it up.
I had a backup the backup copy, but it took 30 minutes to do the cleanup. I decided to mount the virtual drive on another Virtual PC and copy a good version of pci.sys to the bad version. Rebooted the QuickBooks and hoped nothing else was dorked.
That seemed to resolve the problem and I continued with the TurboTax install and everything installs fine, except …
We’ve noticed that you’re running Windows 2000. This is the last year that you can run TurboTax using this operating system…
TurboTax, you’re killing me. Now I got to move my data to an Windows XP Pro Virtual PC.