Never play with your REGISTRY
I am LUCID, sane, wide awake and so I toyed with my PC’s registry. This is in the hope to reinstall a trial version copy of a certain software that I so love to use but cannot afford to buy.. or more like, so loathe to spend on it. And the price for my stubborn cheapness - my system crashed!
The blue screen of death kept flashing at me. The only thing that saved me is another byproduct of my sloppiness - dual boot. When I formatted my PC for the 4th time, I failed to wipe it clean - 2 versions of XP were running on the machine - Home and Pro. And this is what saved me. I logged in on Pro and accessed my files from there. I was even able to export my precious emails from Outlook. Hehe! I used Express - it’s very light and portable.
My zoombie mental state is what saved me in the end. I must really be lucky.