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June 5th 2006

(2) Wonderful Windows

So, as one person returns to Windows, so do I. After 16 hours of endless IRC chatting, recovery console commanding and generally scraping the ‘Dell‘ logo off my laptop I decided to go ahead and just reformat my harddrive and reinstall Windows XP.

I’ll tell you, I’ve never been so happy to see to the Microsoft logo come up on my screen. It took just over an hour to reformat my drive and install wonderful Windows XP. If you haven’t read my previous posts on this issue you won’t know that while trying to install Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my laptop it corrupted my hard drive which meant that Windows would not boot. I managed to transfer my personal documents through numerous trips back and forth between a Knoppix live CD on my laptop and my desktop computer but it was so slow and I had to keep reformatting my USB stick every time I wanted it to work in Knoppix again - for a reason unknown to me. Having a fresh install of Windows was really nice and without the extra Dell shite they provide it was even better. Besides having to reinstall my audio drivers (after talking to a nice Indian woman for 10 minutes) everything was great.

Thanks to a friend I managed to take my Thunderbird profile with me so I lost no e-mails or e-mail account information, for which I’m greatly thankful for. I’ve reinstalled Firefox and all the other applications that are essential and also I’ve managed to navigate through the maze of unending upgrades via Microsoft Update - oh, what a strain on the eyes and the internet connection.

So, I have my laptop back. But at what price? Well, I’m not going to be touching any linux distribution any time soon; niether on my laptop or desktop computer. I’ve also learnt that no matter how many times the install goes right and you’ve backed up, when you don’t back up it’s guarenteed to go wrong. Stupid me. I still like Ubuntu though and I’ll continue to use it specifically the live CD.

So, thanks to everyone that replied and anyone who meant to but didn’t find the time :D. Problem resolved, although not the way I wanted it to get resolved.

Reader Comments

Cow said:

You used to be a fan of VLOS

Sunny Man’s Blog » Blog Archive » Windows Vista Beta 2 Thoughts said:

[…] I took no notice of other people’s advice not to upgrade my current Windows XP installation to vista because I didn’t have enough space to create a new partition for Vista nor did I want to erase all my precious data for a fresh install. So, unlike my linux install on my laptop, I backed up all my documents and application data onto a few DVDs and I started the install. The upgrade process took around 5 hours for me - maybe because of the large amount of space my Windows XP partition occupied. After the update process had restarted my computer numerous times it was time to boot up Microsoft Windows Vista - oh, the err… joy. […]