Made it to LA.
Made it to LA. Found the hotel, found the convention center, got my badge.
I had one near disaster, that created some inconvenience on the way here. One of the last things I did with the laptop was compress a lot of files on the C: drive. I basically right-clicked drive C, selected Compress, and let it run overnight.
Next day in LA, when I boot the laptop up so I can use it with the GPS to find the hotel, I get the message that the boot manager is compressed, and told to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot. No other options.
So here I am in LA at the Microsoft PDC and my laptop is toast. Fortunately a co-worker burned me a copy of the XP setup disc and I was able to uncompress the boot manager by starting the recovery console and then doing an attrib -c bootmgr.
The conference starts tomorrow morning.