My laptop at home was beginning to run slowly and Windows took forever to boot. I’ve had the computer for a little more than 18 months, and in all that time I haven’t re-installed it one single time, which must be a record for me.
Before re-installing Windows there is always a lot of backing up to do – mainly I wanted to tranfer my emails and contacts, which were now stored in Outlook – on the clean install I didn’t want Microsoft Office installed, so firstly I installed Thunderbird which automatically imported everything from Outlook without a hitch. Sweet. I then downloaded MozBackup which is a small application which allows you to backup your Mozilla profile into a single file, which I then transfered to one of my external harddrives. Because I have a file server and external harddrives at home, all that was left to transfer were all the files under “My Documents”, which took me about 10mins.
With everything backed up, I put the Windows cd into the pc, crossed my fingers and hoped that everything went smooth. It did! This is probably the easiest install of Windows I have ever experienced, and I guess I have done it approximately 50+ times.
With a clean version of Windows, I started installing all the necessary applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice, HTMLkit, Photoshop, Illustrator, Nero, IrfanView, Winamp, BS Player, AdAware SE and Miranda.
The result of the re-install is remarkable: Windows definently boots faster, my applications aren’t running slowly and I even got the WiFi to work, which it didn’t do before. Now I just need to order some more RAM – I am only running on 512mb, which in theory should be enough. It’s not.
I’ve already ordered a USB Bluetooth Device, so I can run FMA and Mobile Master on both my laptops (home and work), which means that my contacts and calendar will be synchronized on both laptops and my K700i phone.
Tomorrow I will write about all the extensions/plugins I use for my applications.