Laptop reinstalled!

Well, I got the laptop reinstalled anyway. Was a bit touch-and-go for a while, as my WinXP Pro disk was a lot more scratched then I thought it was, and it kept throwing up errors like "Unable to read <file>: it appears to be corrupted". So, there was a lot of taking the CD out of the machine, trying to clean off the surface as best I could, and putting it back in again. Got it eventually tho!

I love the way windows tends to bloat out. Here's the space it started taking up on my HD:

• "Clean" WinXP pro install: 2.61Gb


• WinXP + Service Pack 2: 4.16Gb


• All my applications installed: 5.62Gb


• Adding in device drivers: 5.77gb

I still have to do Windows Upgrade, reckon that'll probably push me above the 8gb mark, what with all the backup points it'll want to set. I remember on time reading that some guy managed to get a Windows install down to 450Mb(ish) by getting rid of all the crap that never really gets used. Must try to find out how.......

Then again, before I did the reinstall I was down to 5Gb free on a 20Gb partition. The old saying is true: "crap accumulates". it doesn't seem to have gotten rid of all of my problems tho - the machine still seems to be running hot, shut down twice while I was installing stuff, and the 'e' key is still sticking (tho not as much as it was?). It could be the dodgy power supply, which hopefully I'll be getting a replacement for tomorrow. Hopefully the gfx driver issue will be gone tho, so I can actually run games without the machine dying on me! Speaking of which, where are them game CDs........

(later)

well, I was slightly wrong about online updates, but they did add anothr 800Mb to the install. Gotta love windows security, aftr I put SP2 on, I still had ot go get 38 more patches, 34 of them being security patches! The wonderful descriptions they put on them too are so inspiring: "A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it. ", and that's it, no more detail. They should have a "tell me the truth" checkbox so that ppl who can handle the news about which bit of XP has been hacked now can see a bt more details without scaring off Joe Six-pack.