Reinstalling laptop - again

Well, here I go again. Re-installing my laptop to get rid of all the cruft. Let's see how things bloat out this time:

• Clean WinXP install: 2.50Gb


• All drivers added: 2.63Gb


• Service Pack 2 installed: 3.77Gb


• All windows updates added: 4.67Gb


• All my main apps (browser, firewalls, office etc) installed: 6.08Gb

So, once you have all of your crap up to date and installed, a "workable" windows install comes out as nearly three times the size of what you get from putting in your install CD!

I made one slight little boo-boo tho. Was trying to be smart, and burned a winxp CD with winrar and aceFTP on it, so that as soon as the machine was installed I could FTP over to the machine I backed everything up to on, pull over all my stuff and unrar it in one go - no need to go messing with different install CDs. One slight problem - I should have also added the drivers for my ethernet card onto the CD as well, as aceFTP couldn't connect to the non-existent network to get to the machine to pull things over. Ah well, you live and learn I guess...... I got around it using my trusty iPod - I hooked it up to the machine I had me stuff on, transferred over my drivers, hooked it up to the laptop and away I went!

I finally got to the stage of connecting to automatic updates, and even after I have SP2 installed, I get hit with having to add *43* more "critical security updates", plus another 9 optional software and 2 optional hardware updates. I dunno about you, but any company who produces a big-ass service pack to fix all the issues since the OS released, and then has to throw another 43 critical updates on it a year later, still isn't fully embracing the whole "trusted computing" secure-by-design philosphy.....