I spent a good part of my Thanksgiving break and the early part of this week revamping my two PCs — backing up, reformatting, partitioning, reinstalling Windows XP. It was the biggest pain in the ass and truly made me appreciate even more the beauty, simplicity, and superiority that is the Mac OS.
After much stress and many long nights, both systems are pretty much back up to speed and super-snappy. I’ve created a partition on each dedicated only to OS and Program Files, so that will go a long way in keeping a snappy system running. And I finally have sorted out my data enough such that I can use my old PC purely as a backup machine (and host to all my software installers).
A Dell tech was even here on Tuesday to replace my DVD-R drive since it could do everything but record DVDs. Even after replacing it, it would still not work, so that’s the last thing I have left to test since reinstalling the OS. I also bought a new spindle of DVD-Rs in case the spindle was bad, as the tech suspected.
New strategy: Install only the apps I really, really need to keep things running smoothly. I also have another OS partition on which I’m going to install Windows 2000 for testing purposes.