I’m installing Windows 2000 on a machine here at home to do some testing. Windows 2000 is great for this kind of thing, although I’m finding that certain things aren’t supported on it anymore. New versions of DirectX, for example, don’t support Windows 2000. Nor, then will .NET 3.0 be supported on Windows 2000 because Windows Presentation Foundation requires the latest DirectX. (At least, I think it does.)

In any case, I was installing DirectX 8 earlier and it came up with a very helpful error message: “DirectX setup could not locate a required directory.” Yep, that’s all. No telling what directory it couldn’t locate. That’d make too much sense. Of course the user should be able to figure out what directory the setup program is looking for.

It turns that I had deleted my Temp directory (\Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Temp) because some other install vomited all over the directory and I thought it’d be easier to just delete the directory. Other software creates Temp if it doesn’t exist, right? Wrong. And then they don’t tell you where the problem lies.

I love this stuff.