Following our purchase of a shiny new multi-function printer/scanner as reported yesterday, and the prospect of installing the drivers and using Photoshop a lot more, I bit the bullet last night and re-installed Windows on the PC for the first time since it was bought several years ago.
For those who have no idea about this whole subject area, even if you don’t touch it (and I mean don’t touch it), Microsoft Windows slowly degrades in performance over time. In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft invented this thing in the back end of Windows called “The Registry”. Perhaps an analogy would best explain it’s function… imagine if your car secretly kept receipts for every road it had ever been on, and then in order to go on any other road, it had a look in that pile of receipts to see if it had been there before… and then of course, the car begins to get weighed down with the sheer weight of the crap it’s carrying around in it’s pockets. That’s what the registry does to Windows. Don’t even let me get started on hard drive fragmentation.
So - over the course of several years, we take it as read that Windows will lunch itself. We also accept that no amount of “clever” utilities you might install are going to make your computer as fast and efficient as it once was - a bit like cleaning an old car is never going to work as well as buying a new one.
You also discover that over the course of several years that the components within your computer are pretty much all obselete, and cannot be bought over the counter anywhere any more - as I discovered while looking at memory chips during our mammoth shopping expedition yesterday.
Never mind - re-installing the machine will give me back a huge wodge of the memory anyway (and remeber - this is a software developer talking - I know how to reclaim such things from Microsoft Windows).
So - knowing we have all our data stored on an external hard drive (because we don’t trust the computer), I set about wiping the machine last night, and installing the latest version of Windows - “Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3”. It’s not out for the public yet, but I can get it through my work associations with Microsoft. I had been hearing very good things about the latest version of XP - and while Vista would have been nice, with only 760Mb of RAM in the machine, there was no way I would even consider it.
You might wonder why I didn’t think about putting Ubuntu Linux on the computer instead of Windows. One word - drivers. I had just bought a new printer. I wanted to run Photoshop. I wanted to run iTunes. All things that would probably screw up with Linux.
Re-installing the computer took about five hours in all. Windows is of course only the start of it - following the main install, there are graphics drivers, sound drivers, printer drivers, CD Writer firmware updates, monitor drivers, keyboard drivers, Service Pack 3, Firefox, IE7, iTunes, Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Textpad, Python, Chat clients, Foxit Reader (better than Acrobat), WinRAR, and a host of other “nice to have” utilities.
I have ended up with a computer that boots up inside a minute (to the desktop). It launches applications quickly, and most importantly, it doesn’t thrash away just to open Firefox any more.
Now all I have to do is put a great big sign above the computer…
Installing crap on this computer will be punishable by forced eating of beetroot sandwiches