Why would you run Windows any way other than in a VM?
I just finished restoring my Windows virtual disk from a backup in April. At some point in the last couple of months, it got seriously hosed. At startup, I'd always get an "Error loading Tcp Mib" error, and I could no longer run Windows Update.
I googled around for a while about the error, and didn't find anything that helped solve the problem. Microsoft support is free if you can't run Windows Update, so I opened an incident. 48 hours later I got a e-mail from an MS support rep that said the following (a direct quote):
Dear Eric,
Just wanted to say hi and check if there is anything that I can do for you on this particular Service Request. If so, please do not hesitate to let me know and I will be happy to help.
I'm standing by for your reply.
Best Regards,
(name withheld)
Microsoft Windows Update Support Professional
This is not an especially confidence-inducing e-mail, since I'd described the problem (including the error number) when I filed the incident. It was also interesting that it had been well over the 24 hours promised for the incident. Since I'd had a two-week go-round with Microsoft Entourage support that initially cost me $250 before they refunded the money (because I had to solve the problem myself), I decided that the best bet was to drop back to a backup of the VM from before the problem occurred.
This reminded me again why virtualization is so useful. Restoring a VM (a single OS file) is so much simpler and easier than a full restore, especially if you've been storing your documents outside the VM's hard drive. Since Parallels allows me to use documents in my host OS (Mac OS X), I didn't lose any data when I restored to a backup that was 6 months old.