Stay away from Alcohol. It used to be a decent program, but at some point it started installing adware (that cannot be removed without Alcohol itself). People say Daemon Tools is the same these days but I have not verified - personally I didn't have any problems with it, but the last time I've used it was about 2010 I think.

But if you can actually run the installer, then I don't think using a different mounting software will help you - you will most likely run into the same problem.

Edit: missed the post update.

I dunno....I DO know they have two versions...a free one called 52% and a paid/premium one called 104%.

Probably, though I could be wrong.

If you do that I want some copyright monies. ;)

Two ideas(crazy ones): Hire some MS empoyees to make you a custom installer/etc. Or setup an advanced ultra-secure firewall(hardware based) with a team of techs monitoring it and a bunch of other cool tech and such and use the net for like under 3 minutes to DL/install the files(with or without an enemy hacker trying to get in to your mainframe while dramatic music plays).

The first idea would be possible if you're rich or know people high up at MS. The second might make for good tv and could make you rich enough to try option 1. Your call, and again I wish you luck. :)

Windows "black" versions say hi.

For Windows, it doesn't need to be activated until a number of days have passed. With older versions of Windows, I think it was 30 days, and then you can run a command line to "rearm" the trial period to allow it to be used for another additional 30 days. You could do this either 2 or 3 times. Afterwards, you would have to either activate it, or reinstall Windows to get another additional set of trial(s). Not sure if the same method applies with Windows 7 and above.

You could kind of get around it with changing the date/time in the BIOS, but you would have to reset it on every boot, and make sure you shut the system down when you were done using it.

Alright, I won't use Alcohol (there are some people who will be so proud of that).

Yeah, that's what I've been thinking, which is why I don't think the mounting software is the problem anymore, but just the installation process itself.

Well, to start with, the reason that my computer is air-gapped in the first place is that I want a 0% possibility of spyware, and frankly, I don't trust Microsoft at all (though I'll use their products, because how can they spy on me from an air-gapped computer?), so the idea of hiring employees from Microsoft is really not one that I would want to pursue. And besides that, I'm sure they wouldn't be allowed to just alter the software for customers, because there's probably a rule against that to which Microsoft makes them agree.

As for the firewall, again, that's not air-gapped, and so it would require me to be connected to the Internet, which is the whole thing that I'm trying to avoid, because it simply isn't secure enough for me.

Also, I'm not anywhere near rich enough to afford that, anyway, and I want nothing to do with making a TV show, no matter how much money it pays, because I'm a very private person, which is the reason why I'm trying to do this in the first place.

Not bad ideas for brainstorming, though.

The link you gave me seems similar to something that I've read before, and actually links to that very same page, about installing using an online computer and then "migrating" the installation to an offline one. However, as I said before, I'm afraid that might not work, because when I try to use the regular online installation on this computer that I'm on right now, I get an error that says it's not compatible with Windows Vista, and I also don't think that it would be compatible with the 32-bit processor on this computer (which would probably give me another error if not for it already giving me the error about Vista and automatically exiting).

But I do wonder about the possibility of running the .msi files directly, which is something that the person on that forum in your link had mentioned, and said that it worked with the first file (the one which is giving me problems) but that it still caused problems later. I guess I'm afraid of installing something half-way and then having it not be able to later properly repair the installation or otherwise uninstall so that I can reinstall.

For example, years ago, I once installed Visual Studio on an external hard drive (not a portable one, just a regular one which is plugged into the computer), and when that drive later broke, I couldn't uninstall it because it couldn't find the files on the drive, but I also couldn't repair or reinstall it because there was still VS junk in registry and stuff on the C drive, so I had no way to do anything with it. I ended up not using it for a couple years until I eventually got a new computer, and I do NOT want that to happen again!

I suppose if that happened then I could just reformat, but then I'm not sure how I'd register Windows, or for that matter, whether it would even let me, or if it would tell me that the copy with that serial number or whatever is already registered!

What's that?

Yeah, but in this case, there must be some file somewhere that says when it was installed or when it expires, and it just checks that timestamp to see if it's still valid. So I could change it to be WAAAAAY in the future, like a million years or something (I think we use larger data types for dates these days, so I don't think it would cause another Y2K glitch).

But I believe that we've already established that your CPU is 64 bit? Only Vista is 32 bit.
That's why I'm saying that you should install it on a virtual machine (that would obviously have to be at least Win 7 64 bit). Alternatively, even if Vista PC won't run your virtual Windows 7 for whatever reason, you could install 64 bit Linux (on a new partition or on external drive\USB stick) and create your virtual machine in there. Then just install VS on that machine and do what you need.

You need to contact MS support in that case (at least that's how it worked in Windows XP days). You cannot do it automatically but I haven't heard of people having trouble with support.

Here you can now read about one less happy person who called MS because the motherboard broke and the Windows license was OEM; was told to buy a new license.

Looks to me (and you) like that .NET piece of software is not going to last anyway.

So why do you insist to follow Microsoft?

[url=]http://www.codeblocks.org[/url]

So it depends on where you live I guess. In here I've actually heard of examples of people managing to reinstall OEM versions on entirely new PCs.

Oh, that's right! I'm sorry, this ordeal has turned my brain to oatmeal! Sorry about that. Anyway, I might need to figure out exactly how to use this VM software, but I'll have to look into it next week, like maybe on Tuesday, because I'll be fairly busy until then. I just hope this ends up working!

EDIT: Actually though, I just remembered that I've tried to run 64-bit programs before and got an error saying that it can't run them, but now that I think of it, I'm not sure whether it meant because of an incompatibility with the processor or the OS.

Well, that's reassuring I guess.

Maybe it's not relevant to the people that you know or the things that you do, but believe me - C# is popular.

C# (which Code::Blocks does not support by the way) is currently the fifth most popular programming language and is actually still gaining popularity (thanks to Unity and Godot among other things).

I heard later that well-known pc repair shops do not suffer from this as they change so many motherboards.

Yeah, that's basically one of the methods that we've been discussing, except the problem is that I can't run the installer file on my online computer to download the rest of it, because I get an error that says it's not compatible with Windows Vista.