This is a followup from my previous post.

I’ve been wanting to wipe out my PC and reinstall everything all over again for a while because of the terrible and mess the system has landed up in after one and a half years. I kept procrastinating because it was too troublesome to backup everything and I thought I would do it next year when Vista came. Some higher powers decided to send me a telegram telling me to “REINSTALL YOUR WINDOWS” this morning.

I was woken up by my brother complaining of some repeating STOP error. I pressed the reset button and I saw the error message “Unable to load operating system” float up. I loaded up Windows XP recovery console from the Windows XP cd and used “fixboot” to fix the boot sector. Windows booted up but something doesn’t seem too right though… I did a chkdsk and the program “fixed” 10 thousand + security descriptors and upon reboot, Lo! and behold! the system became totally unusable. Services don’t load. Copy and paste don’t work. Drag and drop don’t work. Gosh.

Even Nero doesn’t work. And that means I can’t burn anything! Are all my files to go to waste? I remembered seeing a free burning program somewhere and Deepburner saved my life. I was able to, at least, burn the stuff onto DVDs before removing everything.

Windows XP installation was pretty smooth with only one small hicuup. I loaded up the drivers and accessed Windows and Lo! look at the amount of updates I have to get! Note, my Windows XP CD has been slipstreamed with Service Pack 2 so I’m running Service Pack 2 from the start. (If I didn’t run SP2, I couldn’t have accessed Windows Update anyway.)

Gosh, the amount of stuff to download is horrifying. Goes to show how problematic Windows is.

Installation of the various software took the whole day and at the end it was alright I guess. The only problem is the really slow download speed I need to endure of software. What a bad time for this system failure to happen. Shockingly, I managed to achieve some amazing speeds from local sites (like 1000+ kbps from a local Apache mirror) I scrapped some software that used to be good and is now so problematic that I can hardly use them. Presenting, Zonealarm. I now use the free Comodo Personal Firewall and AntiVirus for my needs.

Now my desktop looks so empty… (No, I don’t have the fortune of playing World of Warcraft.)