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October 19, 2005
A Time-Honoured Tradition
I hit up Fry's Electronics over the weekend, and like every time I go there, I ended up dropping several hundred dollars and coming home with DVDs (The Wrong Guy and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas), software and computer accessories. This time I bought myself a DVD burner for my computer, strictly for backup purposes (no, really). Which will come in handy this weekend, when I perform the time-honoured tradition of formatting my C: drive and reinstalling Windows.
The last time I did this was in 2003, when I got back from my internship at Microsoft with a boxed version of Windows XP. After over 2 years my installation has begun to show its age. Applications are running really slowly, startup time is measured in minutes, and a curious thing has happened to my taskbar: the current application buttons have disappeared. All that's left are the toolbars I have turned on (QuickLaunch bar and MSN Search Toolbar). If I disable these toolbars, my entire taskbar vanishes. Hitting the Windows key makes the Start Menu appear in the top left corner of my screen. And now the latest thing: occasional lock ups, requiring a machine reset (or "warm boot" for those who remember the term).
So for the past three days, I've been attempting to backup my hard drive and preparing for the pain that is reinstalling the OS. If all went well I'll be blogging again on Sunday to let you all know how it went. If it went badly, I'll be posting from work on Monday.
Comments
YES!!!! the Wrong Guy is great - I wish I had a dvd copy (or a vcr).
Posted by: dav at October 20, 2005 7:29 AM