On Friday my Mac Pro upgrades arrived via UPS from Other World Computing – a 4 gigabyte memory kit and two 500 gigabtye Seagate Barracuda hard drives.

I installed them over the weekend – perhaps the easiest hardware upgrade I’ve ever performed. Thanks, Apple.

With the hard drives installed, I moved on to Phase 2: installing a copy of Windows XP Professional on one of the auxiliary drives using Apple’s Bootcamp utility.

Bootcamp worked as advertised, though I’m not sure I’d recommend it to users who aren’t particularly tech savvy. I can see such people getting very nervous during the install process. As Apple warns, making the wrong selection from one of the DOS-looking text menus along the way could wipe the Mac operating off your hard drive. I’d hate to be the tech support guy taking that call.

Once Windows XP was installed, the Mac Pro rebooted into Windows (creepy, I know). That’s when things turned sour.

Within seconds, Windows started to nag me with warning balloons bout the lack of anti-virus software, the urgent need to “activate” Windows and how great it would be if I took a “virtual tour” of Windows to learn about all its great features. Ugh.

The Windows Annoyance Factor rose quickly. I wanted to change a few of the system settings, so I went to the Control Panels area. Finding the Control Panel you want is easy enough, but navigating all the tabs and secondary menus is a nightmare. If you’re lucky (and persistent) you just might find the setting you’re looking for. It’s much easier to locate items in Mac OS X’s System Preferences.

After noticing a lot of essential services weren’t working (such as the Internet), I decided to actually read the Bootcamp instructions I had printed out. Yep, I needed to insert the Leopard disk that came with the Mac Pro to install the proper drivers.

Windows rebooted again, and voila! Everything worked.

That done, I moved on to Phase 3: installing Parallels to enable the use of Windows in the Mac environment without rebooting.

The Parallels installation went smoothly, but after I installed Parallels Tools – the software magic that enables the seamless integration of the Mac OS and Windows – the Windows Annoyance Factor reared its head again. Windows had detected a significant change in my hardware and now needed to be reactivated. (I later discovered a warning to this effect in the copious Parallels user manual.) I had three days until my copy of Windows stopped functioning.

I clicked on the warning balloon to reactivate, which should have been easy. Instead, Windows altered me that I had exceeded my allotted number of activations and needed to contact Microsoft for instructions. I had activated it for the first time just an hour earlier!

I called the toll-free number on the screen and within a minute or two was having a conversation with a computer. The computer voice told me to read an immense serial number-like code to it. After I did that, it gave me another lengthy code, which I typed into a series of 8 boxes. After that my copy of Windows was activated again.

At work, I never fuss with my Windows PC – the IT folk have it set up the way they want it, and that’s fine.

But having experienced a Windows installation at home, I’m learning first-hand at least one reason why many PC users have switched to the Mac. They’ve grown weary of the Windows Annoyance Factor.